DESCHOOLING K

A NOTE

Anarchism The word “anarchy” appears many times in this file, and is the basis for this particular de-schooling alternative. If you’re unsure of how to defend an anarchopedagogy, read this:[Introduction: Anarchist Pedagogies: Collective Actions, Theories, and Critical Reflections on Education, Edited by Robert H. Haworth, 2012, PM Press, ISBN: 978–1–60486–484–7A]

Brief Sketch of Anarchism Anarchism has had a rather bedeviled career, maligned by many, misunderstood by most, and marginalized even by erstwhile theoretical allies. In the popular imagination, it is often seen as simply synonymous with chaos, disorder, or violence; more likely to evoke the image of a smashed Starbucks window than a nuanced philosophy based upon principles of economic and political equality (Starr, 2000). However, the anarchist Emma Goldman defined anarchism in this way: Anarchism, then, really stands for the liberation of the human mind from the dominion of religion; the liberation of the human body from the dominion of property; liberation from the shackles and restraint of government. Anarchism stands for a social order based on the free grouping of individuals for the purpose of producing real social wealth; an order that will guarantee to every human being free access to the earth and full enjoyment of the necessities of life, according to individual desires, tastes, and inclinations. (1911a) Such an idea hardly seems to warrant immediate dismissal. Rather than social disintegration, the normative principles and organizational ideas in anarchist theory advocate social, economic, and political arrangements that affirm a strong valuation of individuals as ends in themselves, a commitment to egalitarian and democratic methods, and a staunch opposition to hierarchical institutional power arrangements that subordinate some individuals to others. Fundamentally, anarchist theory operates under the notion that people can and should determine the direction of their own lives, and that social arrangements should be constructed with this aim in mind. In answering the simple question, “What is anarchism?” it may help to begin by thinking rather of “anarchisms.” The term “anarchism” really refers to a cluster of ideologies, movements and theories that share a family resemblance to each other, rather than to a largely enclosed and holistic system of thought (Guérin, 1970, p. 4) like Marxism. In this way, the wide variety of often conflicting opinions that fall under the label of “anarchism,” especially regarding along what lines a future society ought to be ordered, should not be viewed as simple internal “contradictions.” Rather they represent an experimental “plurality of possibilities” that may be more or less relevant or useful in a variety of different situations (de Cleyre, 2005, p. 48). There are common principles, however, that unify anarchists. The word “anarchy” comes from the Greek, “an,” meaning “no” or “without,” and “archos,” meaning “ruler” or “authority.” In this sense, the concept does not mean “chaos” but rather an opposition to hierarchical power relationships, which are the corporeal embodiment of the notion of “opaque” authority (Sylvan, 1993, p. 221). Thus, opposition to the State and capitalism are appropriately features of anarchist theory, but they are incidental byproducts of this primary rejection of hierarchy, of divisions between those who command and those who are compelled to obey (Bookchin, 2005, p. 27). This simple principle of opposition to hierarchy and imposed authority, taken seriously, logically extends to an opposition to all dominating and exploitative social, political, and economic power relationships, including not just capitalism and the State, but patriarchy, racism, sexism, heterosexism, war (and by extension, imperialism), and any number of other manifestations of power disparity as harmful to human development. Anarchism is not simply a negative critique. Moving beyond the extensive list of

things anarchists are opposed to, the anarchist opposition to hierarchy implies a wide variety of positive means of association. Behind any specifically proposed social arrangements, however, are a few general principles, which will be elaborated in the next sections.

1NC SHELL

1NCThe affirmative’s attempt to legislate education under a mask of benign objectivity locks in the existing problematic power structures that permeate systems of formal educationMalott ’12 [Curry Stephenson Malott, assistant professor in the Department of Professional and Secondary Education at West Chester University of Pennsylvania, “Anarcho-Feminist Psychology: Contributing to Postformal Criticality,” Chapter 14: Anarchist Pedagogies: Collective Actions, Theories, and Critical Reflections on Education, Edited by Robert H. Haworth, 2012, PM Press, ISBN: 978–1–60486–484–7, p. 278-279, schauer]

Institutional First and foremost, social structures, such as institutions of formalized education, have been constructed and

developed around behaviorist models of lesson planning, curriculum development, and classroom management, and internalized by policy-makers, educational leaders, teachers, students, and caregivers to such an extent that they are viewed as just how it is, or a nonperspective. No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top, for instance, are examples of how behaviorist practices have been federally

enforced through legislation. Of course nowhere within these examples of legislation does it say they are informed by behaviorist principles. Rather,

they are presented as the objective results of what science tells us are the best methods of teaching literacy.

The message is that they are not embedded with a political agenda, but represent an objective approach to learning. Supporting this propaganda approach to education is the corporate media, which also has played a significant role demonizing the anarchist movement. Even many Marxists use the term anarchy to describe that which is assumed to be unorganized, undesirable, and unproductive, such as the anarchy of the market. While this tendency has historical presidents between Marx himself and prominent anarchists such as Bakunin, it is certainly not helpful to the movement for democratic globalization. However, the corporate media’s attack on anarchy has undoubtedly had far greater effects than Marxists who themselves tend to be ignored or demonized by the same media outlets. Graeber (2002), for example, points to the media’s repeated insistence that the anarchists of the Seattle WTO protests were violent, despite the fact that they hurt no one. What the mainstream, corporate media seemed to be most frustrated with, argues Graeber (2002), was the fact that the new anarchists were decidedly not violent. That is, it is a lot more difficult to demonize and ignore a group’s ideology and position when they are nonviolent. The mass media would have had a much easier time

convincing people anarchists were scary monsters had they actually been physically assaulting police officers and civilian bystanders. It is therefore the challenge of critical postformal educators to demonstrate through our teaching and scholarship the practical reasons why critical theories and practices, such as anarchy, are favorable alternatives to the neoliberal order that currently dominates. People must come to understand that the current neoliberal trajectory is not only unsustainable, but it is dangerously irresponsible. The media has conditioned millions of people to equate democracy and freedom with capitalism rendering the struggle for genuine democracy an

incredibly difficult undertaking. Consequently, many critical pedagogues have given up hope believing the only way paradigmatic change will come is through the catastrophic physical and economic collapse of the current system.

What these institutional barriers suggest is that part of the solution requires an individual approach.

This results in pedagogical warfare, psychological violence, consumerist environmental degradation and totalitarianism – these outweigh and turn the caseIllich ‘71 [Ivan Illich, Founder of the Center for Intercultural Documentation in Cuernavaca, Mexico, Priest in the Roman Catholic Church, Former Vicerector to the Catholic University of Puerto Rico, Ph.D. in history from the University of Salzburg, Studied Theology and Philosophy at the Gregorian University in Rome, 1971, Deschooling Society, Published by Harper and Row, http://www.arvindguptatoys.com/arvindgupta/DESCHOOLING.pdf]

School has become a social problem ; it is being attacked on all sides, and citizens and their governments sponsor unconventional experiments all over the world. They resort to unusual statistical devices in order to keep faith and save face. The mood among some educators is much like the mood among

Catholic bishops after the Vatican Council. The curricula of so-called "free schools" resemble the liturgies of folk and rock masses. The demands of high-school students to have a say in choosing their teachers are as strident as those of parishioners demanding to select their pastors. But the stakes for society are much higher if a significant minority loses its faith in schooling. This

would endanger the survival not only of the economic order built on the coproduction of goods and demands, but equally of the political order built on the nation-state into which students are delivered by the school. Our options are clear enough. Either we continue to believe that institutionalized learning is a product which justifies unlimited investment or we rediscover that legislation and planning and investment, if they

have any place in formal education, should be used mostly to tear down the barriers that now impede opportunities for learning, which can only be a personal activity. If we do not challenge the assumption that valuable knowledge is a commodity which under certain circumstances may be forced into the consumer, society will be increasingly dominated by sinister pseudo schools and totalitarian managers of information . Pedagogical therapists will drug their pupils more in order to teach them better , and students will drug themselves more to gain relief from the pressures

of teachers and the race for certificates. Increasingly larger numbers of bureaucrats will presume to pose as teachers. The language of the schoolman has already been coopted by the adman . Now the general and the policeman try to dignify their professions by masquerading as educators. In a schooled society, warmaking and civil repression find an educational rationale . Pedagogical warfare in the style of Vietnam will be increasingly justified as the only way of teaching people the superior value of unending progress. Repression will be seen as a missionary effort to hasten the coming of the mechanical Messiah. More and more countries will resort to the pedagogical torture already implemented in Brazil and

Greece. This pedagogical torture is not used to extract information or to satisfy the psychic needs of sadists. It relies on random terror to break the integrity of an entire population and make it plastic material for the teachings invented by technocrats. The totally destructive and constantly progressive nature of obligatory instruction will fulfill its ultimate logic unless we begin to liberate ourselves right now from our pedagogical hubris, our belief that man can do what God

cannot, namely, manipulate others for their own salvation. Many people are just awakening to the inexorable destruction which present production trends imply for the environment , but individuals have only very limited power to change these trends. The manipulation of men and women begun in school has also reached a point of no return , and most people are still unaware of it . They still encourage school reform , as Henry Ford II

proposes less poisonous automobiles. Daniel Bell says that our epoch is characterized by an extreme disjunction between cultural and social structures, the one being devoted to apocalyptic attitudes, the other to technocratic decision-making. This is certainly true for many educational reformers, who feel impelled to condemn almost everything which characterizes modern schools-and at the same time propose new schools . In his The Structure

of Scientific Revolutions, Thomas Kuhn argues that such dissonance inevitably precedes the emergence of a new cognitive paradigm. The facts reported by those who observed free fall, by those who returned from the other side of the earth, and by those who used the new telescope did not fit the Ptolemaic world view. Quite suddenly, the Newtonian paradigm was accepted. The dissonance which characterizes many of the young today is not so much cognitive as a matter of attitudes--a feeling about what a tolerable society cannot be like. What is surprising about this dissonance is the ability

of a very large number of people to tolerate it. The capacity to pursue incongruous goals requires an explanation. According to Max Gluckman, all societies have procedures to hide such dissonances from their members. He suggests that this is the purpose of ritual. Rituals can hide from their participants even discrepancies and conflicts between social principle and social organization. As long as an individual is not explicitly conscious of the ritual character of the process through which he was initiated to the forces which

shape his cosmos, he cannot break the spell and shape a new cosmos. As long as we are not aware of the ritual through which school shapes the progressive consumer --the economy's major resource--we cannot break the spell of this economy and shape a new one.

Vote negative to endorse an anarchopedagogy of deschooling.This isn’t simply banning schools but instead a form of institutional sabotage that paves the way for radical alternatives that function on individual, community, and structural levelsTodd ’12 [Joseph Todd, adjunct instructor at MSU and Bergen Community College teaching both philosophy and education courses, “From Deschooling to Unschooling: Rethinking Anarchopedagogy after Ivan Illich,” Chapter 4: Anarchist Pedagogies: Collective Actions, Theories, and Critical Reflections on Education, Edited by Robert H. Haworth, 2012, PM Press, ISBN: 978–1–60486–484–7, p. 74-75, schauer]

In direct opposition to these debilitating practices, anarchopedagogy stands to reimagine education, building it on principles of freedom, equality, and community. For Illich a “renewal of education [requires] an institutional framework which constantly educates for action, participation, and self-help” (Illich, 1970, p. 64). Illich himself did not

articulate his project as anarchic but the similarities cannot be ignored. Perhaps he moved through anarchy unconsciously as Ward suggested in the beginning. The features that we must be aware of and actively seek out and plan for in any educational alternatives are stated repeatedly by anarchist theorists and deschooling advocates (Godwin, 1966; Ward, 1966; Watt, 1981; Hern, 1996; Farenga, 1998; Llewellyn, 1998; Suissa, 2001; Holt &

Farenga, 2003; DeLeon, 2006; Morrison, 2007; DeLeon, 2008; Kahn, 2009). These include: 1 at the level of the individual: autonomy, student-directed learning or self-help, and active learning; 2 at the level of the community: participation, mutual aid, social/political action, and participation; 3 and lastly at the structural level: decentralized management and nonhierarchical relationships. Illich advanced that “the way ahead will be found by those unwilling to be constrained by the

apparently all-determining forces and structures of the industrial age” (Illich, 1969, p. 17). Imagining alternatives and creatively inventing and constructing these alternatives is profoundly anarchic. As an anarchic technique “[direct action] is most viable when communities decide that institutional structures can no longer serve them and actions must be done now to alleviate the problem” (DeLeon, 2006, p. 133). Homeschooling can be viewed as direct action of the family

against the institutional structure of school and deschooling, in its most overtly political and activist-oriented manifestation, could even be viewed as a form of institutional sabotage, another anarchic technique to use against compulsory schooling. The process begins politically as parents and students choose to defy the expectations of compulsory schooling and instead invent their alternative. Illich maintained that “[only] disenchantment with and detachment from the central social ritual and reform of that ritual can bring about radical change” (Illich, 1970, 38). In regard to this concern, there seems to be a need for rigorous and

sustained opposition to the social ritual and reflective/ creative efforts to overcome schooling, outside of the institution of schools. The institution is not only abusive to the rights and freedoms of children and schools

us to internalize this politically desirable silence, but is equally oppressive to parents and even teachers, the community, and society at large. John Holt doubted whether the public would ever question and divert public school funding and, for this reason, worked to provide alternatives outside of schools (Farenga, 1998, p. 127). In order to challenge the

funding one would already need to be deschooled to an extent. In this way Holt might be right; we need a space to deschool as individuals, families, and communities before the entire institution of compulsory schooling can be combated .

LINKS

Link – Funding Couching changes to the education system in terms of funding gets coopted by the state – Occupy Berkeley provesCrimethInc. ’12 [CrimethInc., 1/1/12, “Nightmares of Capitalism, Pipe Dreams of Democracy :The World Struggles to Wake, 2010-2011,” . CrimethInc. is a rebel alliance of anonymous collective activists, https://crimethinc.com/2012/01/01/nightmares-of-capitalism-pipe-dreams-of-democracy-the-world-struggles-to-wake-2010-2011, schauer]

The economic crisis that entered the public consciousness in 2008 prompted governments to inflict massive cutbacks on public education. The student movement that began in December 2008 with the occupation of the New School in New York City—itself a private school—intensified with a series of protests and occupations throughout fall 2009, principally in California. 1 These culminated in nationwide demonstrations on March 4, 2010. The Bay Area was the epicenter of this day of action, with tens of thousands in the streets; but at this epicenter, the contradictions within the movement

came into stark relief. While anarchists had been at the forefront of the occupations , reformists took the lead in organizing for March 4, planning a standard march and rally. They also attempted to seize control of the narrative. A week before the day of action, a dance party at UC Berkeley turned into a small-scale riot as students took the streets, mingling with non-students and defending themselves against police attacks. There were only two arrests, but afterwards liberals and leftists alleged that outside agitators were attempting to hijack the movement—a story some had been repeating for months, which has become all the more familiar since. As in the anti-war movement seven years earlier,

anarchists had largely limited themselves to escalating the tactics of the student movement. Most militant actions were organized informally, and there was neither an autonomous body for coordinating these nor a voice for them in the organizational structures of the larger movement. This

opacity offered the element of surprise, but it ultimately enabled reformists to outflank radicals by dominating the public discourse and planning actions that were unfavorable for confrontation . Likewise, because anarchists weren’t able to popularize a narrative identifying the student movement with the larger struggles of the disenfranchised, most people took it for granted that the point of the struggle was simply to get more funding for public education. Consequently, it was difficult to legitimize the participation of non-students except as passive “allies,” let alone make a case for a struggle against government. On March 4, a march of several thousands departed from Berkeley towards Oakland. Student organizing groups jockeyed with black-clad militants for the lead. The march joined younger students and teachers in downtown Oakland for a rally at which the usual speakers took turns at the podium. A breakaway march had been planned to depart from the rally, but one speaker took the stage to discourage anyone from participating, emphasizing that it would be illegal and dangerous. The word on the street was that radicals had established some sort of back-room deal with public organizers that the latter reneged on. Most people left after the rally, but a couple hundred eventually regrouped around a sound system and set out, managing to block the freeway before being mass-arrested. A fifteen-year-old student fell from the freeway when the police closed in, suffering serious head injuries and tragically confirming the speaker’s warning. Afterwards, there were declarations of victory and hysterical recriminations, but the student

movement had passed its peak. Without the initiative of the militant participants driving the movement, the reformist wing drifted into

hopeless attempts to influence politicians; momentum collapsed. The same pattern played out elsewhere in the country. Anarchists have to find a starting place from which to act in a society in which few even understand our goals. This creates paradoxes such as joining a struggle for education in a country in which education has always been tied to the state. Participating in the student movement, anarchists risked legitimizing social structures, roles, and privileges they would otherwise set out to undermine. The student movement of 2009-2010 might have gone further if it had been reframed as a part of a larger struggle involving all who were losing or had already lost their positions in the economy—not to mention those who never had any in the first place. In any case, it set the stage for Occupy Oakland to do this.

The affirmative’s increase in funding is a hollow promise - throwing money at an already defunct system in the name of bankrupt reform only exacerbates problems and trades off with deschooled community-buildingHern ‘98 – Matt Hern, Writer and activist based in East Vancouver, Founder of the Eastside Learning Center and Groundswell: Grassroots Economic Alternatives, Ph.D. in Urban Studies from the Union Institute & University, M.A. from the Institute for Social Ecology in Plainfeild, Vermont, 1998,“The Promise of Deschooling” Social Anarchism, Volume 25, https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/matt-hern-the-promise-of-deschooling]

A Political Argument

A political argument in favour of deschooling is a fairly simple one. Schools are huge businesses. They command massive amounts of capital, huge administrative apparatuses, they have enormous workforces and sprawling facilities, “Schooling is the largest single employer in the United States, and the largest grantor of contracts next to the Defense Department”. Over the course of a century, schools have developed into monumental undertakings, and the money that

pours into them comes directly out tax dollars. Schooling is “a very profitable monopoly, guaranteed its customers by the police power of the state”. Schooling is about the triumph of the state over families and communities, and the spectacular entrenchment of bureaucracy at innumerable levels makes reform unthinkable. All

across North America the pattern is relentless: tax money is appropriated in ever growing amounts and amassed in Ministries of Education, with colossal infrastructures and blanket mandates to license schools, accredit teachers and manufacture curricula. These Ministries then distribute that money to sanctioned school districts, themselves with huge bureaucracies who transfer money and required curricula to the actual schools. Teachers, also all accredited and sanctioned, are then given a series of groups of

children, and are required to pass on a required curriculum in a required time frame. The effect is a seemingly endless hierarchy , with a

downward spiral of tighter and tighter control, so that at the classroom level there is minimal flexibility. Teachers are given strict guidelines about discipline, achievement, pedagogy and time. They are reduced to information conveyers, passing on a prescribed set of knowledges to a prescribed population in a strictly regulated environment. And the real losers, of course, are the kids and their families. First, they are seeing only a sliver of their tax dollar returned to them, and have no political voice in how or where that sliver is spent . As John Gatto (1935- ), a past New

York City and State Teacher of the Year and now vigourous deschooling advocate shows: Out of every dollar allocated to New York schools 51% is removed at the top for system-wide administrative costs. Local school districts remove another 5% for district administrative costs. At the school site there is wide latitude (concerning) what to do with the remaining 44%. but the average school deducts another 12% more for administration and supervision, bringing the total deducted from our dollar to 68 cents. But there are more non-teaching costs in most schools: coordinators of all sorts, guidance counselors, librarians, honorary administrators who are relieved of teaching duties to do favours for listed administrators... under these flexible guidelines the 32 cents remaining after three administrative levies is dropped in most schools to a quarter, two bits. Out of a 7 billion dollar school budget this is a net loss to instruction from all other uses equaling 5 1/2 billion dollars. This kind of pattern is recognizable in every school district across the continent. There is an incredible amount of money devoted to education, for example, “in Washington State nearly half of every tax dollar is spent on kindergarten through twelfth-grade education.”, and precious little of it is ever returned to those it was appropriated for, “New York State, for instance, employs more school administrators than all of the European Economic Community nations combined.” There is an amazingly pervasive myth that government schooling is cheaper than private education, and that opposition to schools is thus a necessarily elitist proposal. It is a contention that is plainly absurd, and one that common sense, a priori evidence and statistics prove foolish. of the two forms (public and private) ... public school is by far the most expensive in direct cost (we’ll leave social costs out of it for the moment!), averaging $5500 a year per seat nationally, to a national average for all forms of private education of about $2200.

The scale of school bureaucracy is monstrously wasteful , and as a government sponsored monopoly with guaranteed customers there is no pressure on schools to perform , in fact the opposite is true. Schools are rewarded for failure. When students emerge from schools with minimal skills and degraded personalities, the call inevitably goes up for more school money, more teachers, longer school years, more rigourous regulation. Schools are failing at even their own narrow mandates, and yet the response is to then increase their power and scope, which is the reverse of what is really needed. We need fewer schools and less schooling . The inherent logic of centralized monopoly schooling is faulty, both in terms of economics and pedagogy. Schools have always been conceived of in terms of warehousing and the efficient maintenance of a maximum number of children, and in a very limited way, contemporary schools are moderately effective at that,

although hardly cost-effective. The difficulty with school logic is that kids habitually defy regimentation and families continue to demand that their children be given conditions to flourish in. What it means to flourish though, and what each individual family

and child needs to grow into themselves is as variable as kids themselves. Every child is a unique and enigmatic individual with all the

nuances and contradictions humanity entails, and each requires a specific set of circumstances and environments to learn, grow and flourish that only the kid and their family can even begin to comprehend. Necessitated by its very structure, compulsory schooling attempts to standardize and regulate all students’ patterns of learning, and plainly does not and will not work . This represents the street-level tragedy of schooling, and underlines a political argument for deschooling. The centralized appropriation of school money drains families and local communities of the resources to create locally and individually appropriate learning environments .

What is needed is a vast, asystematically organized fabric of innumerable kinds of places for kids to spend their time. A decentralized, deschooled community vision includes homelearners of every stripe, learning centres , traditional schools, religious schools, Montessori, free schools, arts and performing centres, dance troupes, language training, athletic clubs etc., all organized on the basis of local need and interest. The resources should be available in every community to create a swath of local answers, and for each family and kid to develop their own educational

and pedagogical approaches. The attempt to drive all children into centralized, compulsory and regimented schooling is an absurd scam and wasteful at every level . I t is impossible for healthy children to thrive in such circumstances, and the century-long effort to enforce schooling has been hugely costly. It is a burden our communities should bear no longer.

Link – Reform Reform fails – compulsory schooling is a technology of power. Even radical changes don’t change nature of schooling.Gabbard ’12 [David Gabbard, professor of educational foundations in the College of Education at East Carolina University, “Updating the Anarchist Forecast for Social Justice in Our Compulsory Schools,” Chapter 2: Anarchist Pedagogies: Collective Actions, Theories, and Critical Reflections on Education, Edited by Robert H. Haworth, 2012, PM Press, ISBN: 978–1–60486–484–7, p. 42-44, schauer]

According to an April 2011 report from the Economic Policy Institute, “the unemployment rate for workers aged sixteen to twenty-four was 18.4%—the worst on record in the sixty years that this data has been tracked” (Shierholz & Edwards, 2011). Even under the best of economic times, I couldn’t honestly tell either of my sons that doing well in school and going on to earn a fouryear degree would guarantee that they’d be able to find a job in their chosen fields. In today’s economy, however, a four-year degree is even less certain to secure employment, as the unemployment rate for college grads in 2010 reached nearly 10 percent. With 85 percent of college graduates reporting that they are moving back home with mom and dad, we can expect that number for 2011 to climb even higher. At least I can tell them that a college degree still improves their chances, because the unemployment rate among those with only a high school diploma or GED now stands at 22.5 percent. For dropouts, of course, the unemployment rates are even worse at 32.9 percent. For those closer to his age (those between the ages of sixteen and twenty-four), the figures and are far worse. According to a study conducted by the Center for Labor Market Studies at Northeastern University (2009), the jobless rate in 2008 for those with a four-year degree or higher was 13.3 percent, while it was 21.2 percent for those with one to three years of postsecondary education, 31.9 percent for high school graduates, and 54 percent for young high school dropouts. As reflected in the table below, the fewer number of years of schooling that

one completes strongly correlates to both your risk of unemployment as well as your risk of incarceration. At its core, the problem is this: the continued existence of compulsory schooling perpetuates the myth that people’s success or failure hinges on their performance in school. In turn, this allows the state to blame schools for the larger problems in the economy that result in shrinking opportunities for people to find work. And this multitiered game of victim blaming drives the endless calls for school reform. The truth is that schools will never be reformed as long as they are made compulsory by the state. As documented by the Advancement Project (2010), in the thirty years since the state launched its massive A Nation At Risk report and propaganda campaign that blamed schools for the alleged inability of U.S.-based corporations to compete in the global

economy, the only meaningful changes we’ve witnessed in schools have been the implementation of high-stakes

testing/accountability and zero-tolerance policies. Neither of those policies have changed the nature of compulsory schooling, but have only served to intensify its effects ; namely, disciplining docile bodies to accept

boring and monotonous work as an inevitable part of life while subjecting those who refuse to recognize the beneficence of this

therapy to remedial discipline in prison. The United States, which has less than 5 percent of the world’s population, has 25 percent of the world’s prisoners (Liptak, 2008). Figures range from between 1.6 million and 2.3 million Americans living behind bars. As the market economy continues its collapse, we should expect to see these numbers escalate, as globalization and domestic neoliberal policies continue to create a larger surplus population of people whom the market cannot absorb. State policy makers certainly do. As the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (2011) points out in a report titled Misplaced Priorities: Over Incarcerate, Under Educate: Over the last two decades, as the criminal justice system came to assume a larger proportion of state discretionary dollars nationwide, state spending on prisons grew at six times the rate of state spending on higher education. In 2009, as the nation plummeted into the deepest recession in 30 years, funding for K–12 and higher education declined; however, in that same year, 33 states spent a larger proportion of their discretionary dollars on prisons than they had the year before. Corporations and Wall Street investment firms also recognize and seek to capitalize on this same trend. The prison industry complex is one of the fastest-growing industries in the United States. Even the federal government and its defense contractors exploit the

situation. The anarchist critique of compulsory schooling leaves us little room for hope that our schools will ever be different. We are naïve to think that just because we are socialized to call them “public schools” that those schools are meant to serve the public. To the contrary, public schools exist to target the public. In

keeping with the anarchist critique of the state, we need to recognize compulsory schooling as a technology of power, an instrument of statecraft, and the first line of domestic defense for the security state . Like the state itself,

compulsory schooling serves the elite interests of our capitalist oligarchy over the public interests of the majority of citizens. Until state power is wrested from that oligarchy, we can’t reasonably expect schools to function any differently. Indeed, current trends lead us to greater pessimism, not optimism, over the fate of schools, as the neoliberal assaults on schools and teachers’ unions seek to remove the control of schools from the contested ground of the state and place them under the direct control of private

corporations. Sooner or later, people will have to recognize that compulsory schools are part of the problem. Eliminating them is part of the solution.

Link – Schooling Traditional schooling reinforces exploitative labor relations and promotes dangerous nationalismShantz ’12 [Jeffery Shantz, community organizer and teacher at Kwantlen Polytechnic University in Vancouver. whose writings have appeared in academic journals including Critical Sociology, Critique of Anthropology, Feminist Review, and New Politics, “Spaces of Learning: The Anarchist Free Skool,” Chapter 7: Anarchist Pedagogies: Collective Actions, Theories, and Critical Reflections on Education, Edited by Robert H. Haworth, 2012, PM Press, ISBN: 978–1–60486–484–7, p. 126-127, schauer]

Anarchists emphasize the school as a site of political, cultural, social, and economic power . Schooling instills a respect for authority and builds a habitual deference and adherence to the laws of the land. In the words of one of the directors of the anarchist Modern School movement in New Jersey in the 1920s, “From the moment the child enters the public school he is trained to submit to authority, to do the will of others as a matter of course, until the result that habits of mind are formed which in adult life are all to the advantage of the ruling class”

(Kelly, 1925, p. 115). Criticisms of the government-based public school system include its nationalistic emphasis

(with anthems to start school days and flags on buildings and images of presidents or monarchs in every room. Also of concern is training for the demands of the labor market and industrial system rather than for critical analysis or engaged “citizenship.” It is part of organizing more broadly against patriotism and moral regulation within society as well as school systems. Anarchists, like

other radical education theorists, raise concerns about ways in which traditional schooling trains people to accept work that is monotonous, boring, or without personal satisfaction (Spring, 1998, p. 14). There is great, and growing, pressure from policymakers, government officials, bureaucrats, and corporate leaders to direct all education toward the fulfillment of perceived or anticipated demands of the labor market. Education is viewed primarily, or even solely, as career preparation. Learning s placed in the service of a future social role and preparation for that role. As Spring (1998, p. 146) notes: “Knowledge is not presented as a means of understanding and critically analysing social and economic forces but as a means of subservience to the social structure.”

Link – STEM School science perpetuates technocratic elitism – creates exploitative hierarchiesWeinstein ’12 [Matthew Weinstein, professor of science education at the University of Washington–Tacoma, “Street Medicine, Anarchism, and Ciencia Popular,” Chapter 5: Anarchist Pedagogies: Collective Actions, Theories, and Critical Reflections on Education, Edited by Robert H. Haworth, 2012, PM Press, ISBN: 978–1–60486–484–7, p. 103-104, schauer]

Ciencia Popular

To understand street medicine as an educational project, one committed to putting medical knowledge directly in the hands of people, one has to analyze their work in contrast to other parallel projects. Street Medicine-As-Education is an effort to articulate (literally connect) technical knowledge and expertise and

consuming publics. It can be contrasted in this sense with science and health schooling as well as with contrasting projects like citizen science. In school science and health, students are taught to objectify their body, to learn the language of scientists, but ultimately to defer to scientific authority for solutions. In other words, school science is about the production of a consumer class—the development of a bioscientific market for expertise. Morris Shamos (1995) makes this explicit in his book The Myth of Scientific Literacy, arguing that disinterest in science and technology should be taken as axiomatic in school populations; that the purpose of science education should merely be educating people in the processes of science and the knowledge of how to find experts when needed. It should also be clear that science, as embodied by school science, references a standard set of facts, concepts, and technical procedures as canonized in texts like the National Science Education Standards (NRC, 1996). It is

a systematic way of knowing that excludes practices like Chinese medicine and herbalism. Similarly, citizen science projects—that is, projects in which scientists recruit nonscientists to participate with them in research, most famously in bird counts in which birders across North America contribute data about the

bird populations of their communities—often are set up to reaffirm the role of the scientist as expert and the public is a resource or source of labor. Even online efforts such as SETI which farms out calculations in the search or extraterrestrial life—or Folding@Home which does the same for calculations of protein folding—follow this hierarchical model. Ironically, citizen science projects often reveal the fragility of this hierarchy. In many environmental citizen science projects there emerge real tensions between local knowledge of the data gatherers and the scientists’ expert knowledge

(Brandt, Shirk, Jordan, Ballard & Tomasek, 2010). School and citizen science attempt to develop or reinforce hierarchies of authority, knowledge, labor, and consumption. Both have specific visions of democracies as informed publics, but those publics are not self-sufficient communities, but publics that have simultaneously internalized the worldview of the expert and

acquiescence to the expert.

Link – Teaching Teaching in school settings relies on motivation tactics that cement problematic authoritarian principlesShantz ’12 [Jeffery Shantz, community organizer and teacher at Kwantlen Polytechnic University in Vancouver. whose writings have appeared in academic journals including Critical Sociology, Critique of Anthropology, Feminist Review, and New Politics, “Spaces of Learning: The Anarchist Free Skool,” Chapter 7: Anarchist Pedagogies: Collective Actions, Theories, and Critical Reflections on Education, Edited by Robert H. Haworth, 2012, PM Press, ISBN: 978–1–60486–484–7, p. 136-137, schauer]

Anarchist critics argue that poor people learn in school that they should submit to the leadership or authority

of those with more schooling. Those with more schooling, in terms of years and grade levels, tend to be those from more privileged class backgrounds who complete postsecondary education and graduate school. Thus anarchists seek to subvert this relationship of education and leadership or authority, particularly on the basis of class. Here the concern is not with order and efficiency but

with increasing individual autonomy. The goal of social change is increased individual participation and control of the social system. This model rests on the conviction that a great deal of the power of modern social institutions depends on the willingness of the people to accept the authority and legitimacy of these institutions. In this context the question becomes, not how to fit the individual into the social machine, but why people are willing to accept work without personal satisfaction and authority which limits freedom.

(Spring, 1998, p. 131) Anarchists attempt to overcome traditional teacher/student relationships which can inhibit students and reinforce authority structures of command ad obedience. For Stirner, education should assist individuals to be creative persons rather than learners. Learners lose their freedom if will in becoming increasingly dependent upon experts and institutions for instruction on how to

act. Rather than learning how to act they might determine for themselves how to act . Anarchists seek educational practices and relations that will contribute to the nurturance of nonauthoritarian people “who will not obediently accept the dictates of the political and social system and who will demand greater personal control and choice” (Spring, 1998, p. 14). This includes experience in the development of collaborative practices, knowledge sharing and mutual aid, rather than the competition, for grades or status, or emphasis

on individual knowledge possession, intellectual property, and “originality” that marks much of mainstream, particularly postsecondary, education. For anarchists, methods of discipline and reward in mainstream teaching undermine freedom and self-determination (Spring, 1998, p. 25). Too often teachers use extrinsic motivation, through grades, threats of punishment, or promises of promotion (Spring, 1998, p. 25). The focus can readily be displaced onto the extrinsic motive, such as grades.

This is a common feature of the neoliberal classroom, as grades, a surrogate for wages, become a primary concern of students seeking a specific credential, which can be converted to a job on the labor market. This is similar to the process by which satisfaction in the intrinsic qualities of labor has been displaced toward satisfaction in the wage, even where the work itself is despised or debilitating.

IMPACTS

2NC – Framing You should privilege everyday violence over their impact turns for two reasons- A) social bias underrepresents its effects B) its effects are exponential which means even if it only causes a small amount of structural violence, its terminal impacts are hugeNixon ’11 [Rob, Rachel Carson Professor of English, University of Wisconsin-Madison, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor, pgs. 2-3]

Three primary concerns animate this book, chief among them my conviction that we urgently need to rethink-politically, imaginatively, and

theoretically-what I call "slow violence." By slow violence I mean a violence that occurs gradually and out of sight, a violence of

delayed destruction that is dispersed across time and space, an attritional violence that is typically not viewed as violence at all.

Violence is customarily conceived as an event or action that is immediate in time, explosive and spectacular in space,

and as erupting into instant sensational visibility. We need, I believe, to engage a different kind of violence, a violence that is

neither spectacular nor instantaneous, but rather incremental and accretive, its calamitous repercussions playing out across a range of temporal scales. In so doing, we also need to engage the representational, narrative, and strategic

challenges posed by the relative invisibility of slow violence . Climate change, the thawing cryosphere, toxic drift,

biomagnification, deforestation, the radioactive aftermaths of wars, acidifying oceans, and a host of other slowly unfolding environmental catastrophes present formidable representational obstacles that can hinder our efforts to mobilize and act decisively. The long dyings-the staggered and staggeringly discounted casualties, both human and ecological that

result from war's toxic aftermaths or climate change-are underrepresented in strategic planning as well as in human memory. Had Summers advocated invading Africa with weapons of mass destruction, his proposal would have fallen under conventional definitions of

violence and been perceived as a military or even an imperial invasion. Advocating invading countries with mass forms of slow-motion toxicity,

however, requires rethinking our accepted assumptions of violence to include slow violence . Such a rethinking

requires that we complicate conventional assumptions about violence as a highly visible act that is newsworthy

because it is event focused, time bound, and body bound. We need to account for how the temporal dispersion of slow violence affects the way we perceive and respond to a variety of social afflictions-from domestic abuse to posttraumatic stress and, in particular, environmental calamities. A major challenge is representational: how to devise arresting stories, images, and symbols

adequate to the pervasive but elusive violence of delayed effects. Crucially, slow violence is often not just attritional but also exponential, operating as a major threat multiplier; it can fuel long-term, proliferating conflicts in situations where the conditions for sustaining life become increasingly but gradually degraded.

Impact – CapitalismTraditional schooling reproduces neoliberal market values – guarantees dehumanization and ecological destruction on a mass scaleJandrić ‘14 [Petar Jandrić, Professor at University of Applied Sciences in Zagreb, Former Senior Lecturer at The Polytechnic of Zagreb, Ph.D. in Information Science from Sveučilište u Zagrebu, MSc in Education from The University of Edinburgh, 2014 “Deschooling Virtuality,” Open Review of Educational Research, Volume 1, Issue 1, pg. 84-98, December 2nd, http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/23265507.2014.965193?scroll=top&needAccess=true]

Implicitly or explicitly, educators have always recognized their position in and against dominant social forces commonly described as Gramsci's (1992Gramsci, A. (1992). Prison notebooks. New

York: Columbia University Press. [Google Scholar]) superstructures: political power relationships, institutions, culture and the state. At the one hand, education is supposed to liberate

people from ignorance and poverty; at the other hand, educational ‘liberation’ is brought by middle-class teachers who, often unwillingly and/or unconsciously, inculcate dominant value systems and reproduce traditional social inequalities . This power dynamic creates a vicious circle on all levels of educational praxis , including but not limited to the nature of teacher employment. Working within the current educational systems, educators are intrinsic parts of educational Ideological State Apparatuses (Althusser, 2008Althusser, L. (2008). On ideology. London: Verso. [Google Scholar]) which contribute to increasing social inequality. (To make things worse, they are also blamed more than ever for any perceived shortcomings in ‘the system’.) Those who resign might feel better with themselves, but the next person in line will step into their places and perpetuate the system. Adapted from collective work of the small group of British scholars called London Edinburgh Weekend Return Group (Mitchell et al., 1979Mitchell, J., Mackenzie, D., Holloway, J., Cockburn, C., Polanshek, K., Murray, N., McInnes, N., & McDonald, J. (1979). In and against the state. Retrieved 18 March 2013

fromhttp://libcom.org/library/against-state-1979 ), the concept in and against superstructures succinctly summarizes Illich's argument against schooling. However, while the majority of radical educators seek solution in opposition from this unfavourable position (Mitchell et al., 1979Mitchell, J., Mackenzie, D., Holloway, J., Cockburn, C., Polanshek, K., Murray, N., McInnes, N., & McDonald, J. (1979). In and against the state. Retrieved 18 March 2013

fromhttp://libcom.org/library/against-state-1979 ), Illich asserts that all such attempts are deemed a failure and looks for radically different approaches. Illich's argument departs from his wide critique of institutionalization of the contemporary society. ‘Medical treatment is mistaken for health care, social work for the improvement of community life, police protection for safety, military poise for national security, the rat race for productive work’ (Illich, 1971Illich, I. (1971).

Deschooling society. London: Marion Boyars. [Google Scholar], p. 3). Institutionalized society is dialectically intertwined with institutionalized education. ‘The pupil is thereby “schooled” to confuse teaching with learning, grade advancement with education, a diploma with competence, and

fluency with the ability to say something new’ (Illich, 1971Illich, I. (1971). Deschooling society. London: Marion Boyars. [Google Scholar], p. 3). Institutionalized educational systems are necessarily dehumanized . Hence, institutionalized society reduces people to producers and consumers. In the context of learning it could be argued that this is not always bad, as a form of the relationship between producers and consumers

naturally underpins learning (beyond schooling). What makes institutionalized educational systems dehumanized, however, are the static models of ‘ delivering’ education and often perverse ways they feed into capital . Following the line of argument very similar to Frankfurt School critiques of technologies exposed in Herbert Marcuse's One-dimensional man (1964Ellul, J. (1964). The technological society. New York: Vintage Books. [Google Scholar]) and Martin Heidegger's ‘Only a God can save us' interview (1981Heidegger, M. (1981). “Only a God can save us": The Spiegel interview. In T. Sheehan (Ed.), Heidegger:

The man and the thinker (pp. 45–67). Chicago, IL: Precedent Press. [Google Scholar]), Illich shows that stability of institutionalized society is based on constant economic growth. Deeply rooted in the spirit of 1960s and 1970s, he finally concludes that such a model inevitably leads towards ecological destruction of our planet .

Impact – Hierarchy Schooling reinforces dangerous hierarchies that lead to social exclusion and perpetuate psychological violence Hern ‘98 [Matt Hern, Writer and activist based in East Vancouver, Founder of the Eastside Learning Center and Groundswell: Grassroots Economic Alternatives, Ph.D. in Urban Studies from the Union Institute & University, M.A. from the Institute for Social Ecology in Plainfeild, Vermont, 1998,“The Promise of Deschooling” Social Anarchism, Volume 25, https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/matt-hern-the-promise-of-deschooling]

A Cultural Argument

A cultural argument for deschooling follows naturally and easily from a political analysis. The attempt to entrench compulsory schooling is felt throughout society, not only by children, and

the corrosive effects of the school mentality reaches deep . Americanist culture is profoundly mired in what Wendell Berry calls simply ‘a bad way of life’: “Our environmental problems (are not) at root, political; they are cultural ... our country is not being destroyed by bad politics, it is being destroyed by a bad way of life. Bad politics

is merely another result.” Clearly, the domination centralized, hierarchical and compulsory state schooling exercises over our children represents a major support for a bad way of life. A culture of compulsory schooling is a culture that reifies the centralized control and monitoring of our daily lives . A society that has been obsessively schooled from an early age swiftly becomes a place where self-reliance is abandoned in favour of

professional treatments, and the most essential human virtues are transformed into commodities. As Ivan Illich put it in Deschooling Society: imagination is “schooled” to accept service in place of value. Medical treatment is mistaken for health care, social work for the improvement of community life, police protection for safety, military poise for national security, the rat race for productive work. Health, learning, dignity, independence, and creative endeavor are defined as little more than the performance of the institutions which claim to serve these ends, and their improvement is made to depend on allocating more resources to the management of hospitals, schools and other agencies in question...

the institutionalization of values leads inevitably to physical pollution, social polarization, and psychological impotence: three dimensions in a process of global degradation and modernized misery . A schooled society actively undermines the development of self and community reliance , in favour of institutional treatments. A directly democratic agenda has to include an explicit renunciation of the other-controlled mentality of compulsory schooling. There is an important set of distinctions to be made here, and it is a critical deschooling project to carefully define schooling, education and learning. Popular and professional usage tends to conflate the three cavalierly, and the differences in real and perceived meaning are useful.

Schools practise a certain brand of schooling: they are institutions with their own particular ideologies and pedagogical approaches, and they are devoted to schooling , or imparting a certain set of values, beliefs and practises upon their clients. Schooling has found its ultimate (thus far) expression in the current state-run, compulsory child warehousing system we call public schools. But schooling can

still take place outside of schools themselves, and clearly that is what many homeschooling families do, they school their children at home. Schooling is about people- shaping , it is about taking a particular set of values, an explicit view of the way things are or ought to be, and training students to be able to repeat that information in specific ways . The success of schooling can be evaluated in very quantifiable and obvious ways. Teaching is the practise of that transfer of information. The teacher is a professional, someone trained in a variety of ways to coerce, cajole, plead, beg, drive, manipulate or encourage their students to receive, accept and repeat the information they are offering. The teaching profession often attempts to view its work as ‘sharing’, but the practise of teaching and the act of sharing are very different things. One is a service, with one person, very often unrequested, imparting a piece of information onto another, defining the knowledge and evaluating the other’s ability to describe

that knowledge. Sharing is about offering one’s understanding freely, it is allowing another person access to a private understanding. One is professionalized manipulation, the other is friendship and genuine humanity. Further, I want to draw your attention to education. Education is the larger context, the meta-model, the excuse for schooling. The educative stance is an interpretation of what is good and important knowledge to have, a description of what every person ought to know to become a legitimate member of society. Educators describe what people should know, for their own goo d . As Boston writer and unschooler Aaron Falbel writes: I believe that John Holt is right in saying that most people use ‘education’ to refer to some kind of

treatment. ... It is this usage that I am contrasting with learning, ... this idea of people needing treatment. ... Many people use the words ‘learning’ and ‘education’ more or less interchangeably. But a moment’s reflection reveals that they are not at all the same... Learning is like breathing. It is a natural human activity: it is part of being alive. ... Our ability to learn, like our

ability to breathe, does not need to be tampered with. It is utter nonsense, not to mention deeply insulting to say that people need to be taught how to learn or how to think . ... Today our social environment is thoroughly polluted by education ...

education is forced, seduced or coerced learning. This is clearly not a simple semantic discrepancy and begins to mark out important territory. Education is all about the centralization of control, self-directed learning is fundamental to a self- and community reliant culture. The deschooling argument I want to make here presumes that each and every individual is best able to define their own interests, needs and desires. Schools and education assume that children need to be taught what is good, what is important to understand. I refuse to accept this. Kids do not need to be taught. Our children should be supported to become who they are, to develop and grow into the unique, enigmatic, contradictory individuals that we all are, away from the manipulative and debilitating effects of education. The renunciation of education is imperative for the creation of a ecologically sane, decentralized and directly democratic society. As John Holt (1923–85), the Godfather of the unschooling and homelearning movements has written: Education, with its supporting system of compulsory and competitive schooling, all its carrots and sticks, its grades, diplomas and credentials, now seems to me perhaps the most authoritarian and dangerous of all the social inventions of mankind. It is the deepest foundation of the modern and worldwide slave state, in which most people feel themselves to be nothing but producers, consumers, spectators and ‘fans’, driven more and more, in all parts of their lives, by greed, envy and fear. My concern is not to improve ‘education’ but to do away with it, to end the ugly and antihuman business of people-shaping and let people shape themselves. Deschooling suggests

the renunciation of not only schooling, but education as well, in favour of a culture of self-reliance, self-directed learning, and voluntary, non-coercive learning institutions. A disciplined rejection of schooling and education does not insulate a person from the world, it engages them, demands that they make decisions and participate genuinely in the community, rather than waste time in institutions that have limited logic and meaning only internally . I believe that schooling and education are destructive forces across the board, with their implicit and explicit effects being to further entrench and reinforce hierarchy and centralized domination.

A2: “Consequentialism Good”Reject their top down, narrow view of social change and obsession with consequences – an endless pursuit of “How” prevents us from ever asking “Why”Pritchett ’13 [Lant Pritchett, a senior fellow at the Center for Global Development and professor of international development at Harvard's Kennedy School, The Rebirth of Education: Schooling Ain’t Learning. Washingston: Center For Global Development-Bookings Institute Press, 2013, p. 9-10, https://www.cgdev.org/sites/default/files/rebirth-education-introduction_0.pdf, schauer]

This may seem, and is, a very odd book about education. Unlike nearly all in its genre, this is not a how-to book on education. Attention to the “how to” often misses the point of the “why to” of the agents in the system. The main value an economist like me—and I am emphatically not an expert in pedagogy or curriculum or classroom management—brings to a discussion of education is through asking two questions: “Why isn’t it

done this way already?” and “Why will it be done that way in the future?” That is, when people argue that technique X is a better way to teach, I ask, “Why aren’t teachers using X already ? ” Moreover , if X is a better way to teach and teachers are not now

teaching that way, “Why will they do so in the future?” Spider system thinking assumes that the behavior of the entire system is determined at the top and hence changing the spider’s mind about the how of teaching

will change what actually happens. This leads lots of academics, including many economists, to devote their time to the nuts and bolts of the how without focusing on the why . Evolution works the opposite way. The how is derived in a variety of ways from a single why. Lots of animals swim—fish, ducks, mammals, penguins, jellyfish, protozoa. The ways an animal can swim are limited only by the properties of water, and so there are lots of ways animals can swim. But they all swim to survive. Suppose we wanted to increase the average speed of things that swim in a given ecosystem. One might set about to genetically engineer the perfect swimmer. Alternatively, one might just get more

sharks in the water. This ups the ante: “Why swim fast?” Those that can’t swim fast get eaten and those that don’t get eaten reproduce. This produces ecological learning, where overall performance improves. “Planners”—and here I reference again William

Easterly’s work—want to design the perfect robot swimmer and, once having achieved their designed labor of love, are very reluctant to expose their precious design to any real test of performance . “Searchers” think not just about how to swim but about how to create ecosystems in which better swimming is an emergent property of the millions of choices of individuals in the system: lots of swimmers doing different things, an instructional system in the form of swimming lessons, and just enough sharks in the water to create a clear pressure.

ALTERNATIVE

2NC – FramingFilter the alternative debate through an assessment of threat. Why is the alternative threatening? Who is threatened by the alternative? Blanket calls to reject de-schooling are a dangerous tactic of mystification that prevent new epistemological frameworksTodd ’12 [Joseph Todd, adjunct instructor at MSU and Bergen Community College teaching both philosophy and education courses, “From Deschooling to Unschooling: Rethinking Anarchopedagogy after Ivan Illich,” Chapter 4: Anarchist Pedagogies: Collective Actions, Theories, and Critical Reflections on Education, Edited by Robert H. Haworth, 2012, PM Press, ISBN: 978–1–60486–484–7, p. 73, schauer]

For Illich, “[citizens] conceive the inconceivable and thereby create a world free from social inequity.

Illich felt that change is a process of demystification , the eradication of false ideologies imposed by a hegemon, and in order to find

those boundaries, citizens must create alternatives to the status quo” (Sewell, 2005, pp. 11–12). What are the boundaries of

educational change and how do we know when we’re approaching them? In light of the opposition to homeschooling and deschooling, both

domestically and globally, we find it likely that when the State reacts to these educational alternatives with counterinsurgency tactics, we are tiptoeing near the boundary and may even be stepping across, enabling us to look back from the other side. Judging by the reception of homeschooling by the State, teachers’ unions, the public, the media, etc, deschoolers are on the right track because the institution is threatened and actively trying to subvert deschooling projects and silence the movement (Lugg & Rorrer, 2009).

A2: “Alternative Fails”The alt succeeds in exposing the hidden curriculum and enables a systematic dismantling of oppressive structures Todd ’12 [Joseph Todd, adjunct instructor at MSU and Bergen Community College teaching both philosophy and education courses, “From Deschooling to Unschooling: Rethinking Anarchopedagogy after Ivan Illich,” Chapter 4: Anarchist Pedagogies: Collective Actions, Theories, and Critical Reflections on Education, Edited by Robert H. Haworth, 2012, PM Press, ISBN: 978–1–60486–484–7, p. 81-82, schauer]

In addition to opposing new trajectories of oppression we also need more rigorous practices to finding our way out of schooling. We may need new tools and structures that will allow for a more complete deschooling of all manipulative institutions, in particular, the hidden curriculum. The new social identity requires new skills which must be distilled

into deschooling practice. Within the unchallenged hidden curriculum we find patterns of “[capitalism], racism, sexism, patriarchy, heterosexism, and classism [which are] systems of oppression that anarchists resist”

(DeLeon, 2006, p. 3). All of these are a deep part of schooling and to such an extent define the experience in schools . For

this reason, it is not enough to homeschool or even to unschool. An anarchic deschooler must dismantle these systems of oppression; these manipulative institutions and “pay much more attention to ‘missing standards’ such as positive emotions, love of learning, initiative, creativity, and persistence” (Wheatley, 2009, p. 27). Deschoolers require and are advancing a different set of skills and resources than their schooled counterparts . The difference lies in the ideals of freedom and autonomy, but more specifically , on self-discipline, motivation, and persistence that are inherent in the deschooling model. As Illich suggests, “[the] ideal way of life would obviously be to a much greater degree a do-it-yourself life, in which, individuals and small groups took more responsibility for meeting a much wider range of their own needs, rather than concentrating on one specialty and depending on a wide range of other specialists” (Watt, 1980, p. 8).

Their arguments against the alternative rely on fear mongering that paints an unfair picture of chaos – education still exists within the alternativeTodd ’12 [Joseph Todd, adjunct instructor at MSU and Bergen Community College teaching both philosophy and education courses, “From Deschooling to Unschooling: Rethinking Anarchopedagogy after Ivan Illich,” Chapter 4: Anarchist Pedagogies: Collective Actions, Theories, and Critical Reflections on Education, Edited by Robert H. Haworth, 2012, PM Press, ISBN: 978–1–60486–484–7, p. 82-84, schauer]

Deschooling faces similar misunderstandings and resistance as anarchy . The positive definition of anarchy, “a society based on cooperation, social justice, community participation, and mutual aid,” resembles the positive definition of deschooling which focuses on an individual’s relationship to the knowledge she actively acquires and to the local

community, with a propensity for creativity and self-discipline (DeLeon, 2008, p. 123). More simply, in deschooling, learning is without the imposition of the authority of the master or the hidden curriculum of the State or the market (i.e., the public or the private). However, just as with the volatility of the term anarchy, and the negative definition that follows, that of “lawless disorder, violence, oppressive individualism, and chaos,” deschooling too can be perceived with similar fear and hostility, from the individual who has embraced the hidden curriculum as the

means to happiness and achievement, to special interest groups who have much at stake with institutionalized education

and the current trends of charter schools, vouchers, and for-profit schools, and finally the state, which in many ways education reifies (DeLeon, 2008, p. 123). The fear stems from the desire to remove authority from the public or private definition of education and recover a third option to pursue more autonomous learning experiences , overcoming public and private rhetoric. Illich was aware of the controversy surrounding any discussion of “radical alternatives to school-centered formal education,” just as any serious, informed argument in favor of anarchy is represented

sensationally by the media (Illich, 1969, p. 116). In this respect, anarchy and deschooling couple together nicely because they are up

against the same misunderstandings and resistance but also share a radically humanizing potential. If, as

Ward suggested, there might be unconscious efforts toward anarchy, and unschoolers are unconsciously manifesting these anarchic tendencies, the cause might be better served if we are patient and allow for the movement to become self-aware and find its own social identity and anarchic voice to announce its arrival into radical politics, social change, and education revolution. Abowitz (2003) recognizes that “[on] the one hand [counterpublics] function as spaces of withdrawal and regroupment; on the other hand, they also function as bases and training grounds for agitational activities directed toward wider publics” (p. 82). This is something that will define the future of the homeschooling movement and whether the deschooling fringe can make its unique voice audible in wider and wider circles; first, other homeschoolers, then educational policy makers and beyond. Abowitz (2003) suggests that the educational counterpublics will be defined by its fractured overlapping structure, and to some extent this will represent the topology of deschooling, but more important is not the structure of the counterpublic itself, but its structure as it relates to wider and

wider publics. Deschoolers are able to elude the dichotomy of public or private and are able to avoid being reabsorbed into broader publics as long as they stay true to their origin of disenchantment and desire to create a new social reality.

However, an anarchistic interpretation of deschooling allows us to see the features that prevent it from being classified as public or private and also suggests a distinct form of a counterpublic that Abowitz proposes. The anarchist capacity of deschooling may lie, as Richard Kahn (2009) suggests, “in our scholarly capacity to opt-out of the excited drive to reconstruct education once again in the hope of a better world and to recognize the programmatic suffering of our institutionalized existence as students and teachers” (p. 133). We cannot theorize and design for humanity, we can

only practice humanity. And if humanity is not present in obligatory schooling then the only places it has potential to creep up is in deschooled learning spaces. We can only live these changes: we cannot think our way to humanity. . . . The many models which will develop should give each one of us an environment in which we can celebrate our potential—and discover the way into a more humane world. . . . We must build in hope and joy and celebration. (Illich, 1969, pp. 15–16)

A2: “Hierarchies Turn”Alt doesn’t create hierarchies – we foster developmental, not extractive, powerNicholas ’12 [Lucy Nicholas, currently completing a PhD in Sociology at the University of Edinburgh, “Anarchism, Pedagogy, Queer Theory and Poststructuralism: Toward a Positive Ethical Theory, of Knowledge and the Self,” Chapter 13: Anarchist Pedagogies: Collective Actions, Theories, and Critical Reflections on Education, Edited by Robert H. Haworth, 2012, PM Press, ISBN: 978–1–60486–484–7, p. 247-249, schauer]

“Developmental” Power Not “Extractive” Power:

If, as Foucault claims, power is pervasive because of this ontological situation of subjects being constituted by their relations with others and their sociocultural

discursive contexts, how can we distinguish between positive relations and contexts that are fostering “freedom” and negative ones that are fostering dominance? Despite per positing of this pervasiveness, ethical distinctions can still be made from Foucault’s redefinition of power that prevent it from postmodern nihilism and make it possible to use this analysis of power as a point of departure for a poststructuralist anarchist ethics. Foucault implies that positive and negative manifestations of constitutive power relationships can be distinguished. The most explicit clue to Foucault’s ethical telos is in the following statement: “I do not think that a society can exist without power relations . . . The problem, then, is . . . to acquire the . . . morality, the ethos, the practice of the

self, that will allow us to play these games of power with as little domination as possible” (Foucault, 1997, p. 298). This demonstrates that there is the possibility of power relations that are nondominating, that Foucault’s favor lies with these, and that they must be fostered through particular “practices of the self.” Foucault offers examples of practices of (co-)constitution that ze considers positive, and others considered negative. For example, ze states that “the care of the self also implies a relationship with the other insofar as proper care of the self requires

listening to the lessons of the master. One needs a guide, a counselor, a friend, someone who will be truthful with you.” (Foucault, 1997, p. 287) Some examples are specifically pedagogical, for example Foucault has illustrated this distinction between desirable and nondesirable power relations through recourse to the example of different learning relations: I see nothing wrong in the practice of a person who, knowing more than others in a specific game of

truth, tells those others what to do, teaches them, and transmits knowledge and techniques to them. The problem in such practices where power—which is

not in itself a bad thing—must inevitably come into play is knowing how to avoid the kind of domination effects where a kid is subjected to the arbitrary and unnecessary authority of a teacher , or a student put under the thumb of a professor who abuses his authority. (Foucault, 1997, pp. 298–99) The aspects of learning valorized here, then, are guidance and the transmission of knowledge, and the aspects opposed authoritarian. Paul Patton (1994) has developed this distinction, and similarly emphasizes how Foucault’s positing of “power over” (understood as one agent affecting the action of another agent) as an inherent aspect of social relations still allows for normative distinctions between desirable and undesirable types of “power over.” Patton summarizes how: So long as human capacities do in fact include the power of individuals to act upon their own actions, we can see that Foucault’s conception of human being in terms of power enables us to distinguish between those modes of exercise of power which inhibit and those which allow

the self-directed use and development of human capacities. (p. 68) From C.B. Macpherson, Patton develops and applies to Foucault a distinction between “extractive” power over and “developmental” power over, a distinction which has a clear normative premise. Departing

from a nonfoundational ontology, then, developmental power must maximize the capacities of subjects. Patton (1994) offers the following as examples of developmental power relations: “I can affect the actions of another by providing advice, moral support, or by passing on certain knowledge or skills” (p. 63). Similarly, Amy Allen (2005) has argued that, despite Butler’s insistence that subjects are formed in the context of norms (akin to Foucault’s discourses) that precede and shape them, these norms can be distinguished between those that are subordinating and those that are nonsubordinating. Ze states that “If we resist the idea that subjection per se is subordinating, then this opens up the possibility of conceptualizing forms of dependency, attachment

and recognition that are not subordinating.” (p. 210). In terms of educational alternatives, while the learning relationship necessarily entails power relations according to the Foucauldian ontology, “there are . . . structural alternatives to the carceral school, classroom, and society, because there are power relationships and technologies that are not dominating” (Wain, 1996, p. 358). The focus of transformative projects must, then,

become the participatory creation of discourses within which subjects can develop and to which they can attach and identify with, that are not subordinating and extractive. The third section of this chapter will consider some examples of alternative, noncarceral discourses and relationships in specific relation to sexual subjectivity and how knowledge about how “to be” sexual is transmitted in these examples.

PERMUTATION

2NC – Perm do BothInclusion of the plan robs the alt of any transformative function – state schooling is antagonistic with anarchist pedagogyMueller ’12 [Justin Mueller, graduate student in political science, with a focus on political theory at Purdue University, “Anarchism, the State, and the Role of Education,” Chapter 1: Anarchist Pedagogies: Collective Actions, Theories, and Critical Reflections on Education, Edited by Robert H. Haworth, 2012, PM Press, ISBN: 978–1–60486–484–7, p. 27-29, schauer]

The State and the Classroom

In our dreams, people yield themselves with perfect docility to our molding hands. The present education conventions of intellectual and character education fade

from their minds, and, unhampered by tradition, we work our own good will upon a grateful and responsive folk. —John D. Rockefeller (1906) The repression and marginalization experienced by many anarchist schools and experiments, among other obstacles, has

historically made the operation of truly independent anarchist educational programs difficult. The

implementation of anarchist educational and political ideals within the dominant state-run public school systems has had its own set of difficulties. The variety of critiques developed in response to this difficulty are diverse, but they are

all rooted in the notion that various forms of state-run school organization, pedagogy, and practices violate the values and methods anarchists believe to be necessary to cultivate free and critical minds, and defend solidaristic and egalitarian

social relations. A principal critique from anarchist educators has been that the authority relations between

students and teachers, teachers and administrators, and between schools and the state are part of a formidable hierarchy that seeks to instill and reproduce amenable attitudes toward institutional authorities and deference toward authority as such (Chomsky, 2000, p. 17). Rather than develop educational systems that gravitate around the needs of the individual child, children are molded to the goals and

expectations of the state educational system. In a capitalist system, this manifests as publicly funded “apprentice-training for corporations, government” and the reproduction of the educational system itself , as well as “adjusting” students to

their problems with authority (Goodman, 1964, p. 18). For Goodman, the bell-ringing, time-accounting, and hierarchical authority and disciplinary

system of state schools function as a form of behavioral operant conditioning, developing obedience rather than

spontaneity or initiative. Voltairine de Cleyre, an American anarchist and teacher, criticized the school systems at the end of the nineteenth century for

their authoritarian operations and the effects they had upon their unfortunate students. She decried how children were forced to sit silently and absolutely still for hours on end, while being “taught” material that had little relevance to their own lives

and interests and usually sought to expound the virtues of the dominant political order through the guise of a benign claim to “truth.” The effect of this, she noted, was to put “an iron mould upon the will of youth, destroying all spontaneity and freedom of expression” (de Cleyre, 2005, p. 260). Her most effective description of the absurdity of this system is encapsulated in a poignant, if lengthy (as was her style), metaphor: Any gardener who should attempt to raise healthy, beautiful, and fruitful plants by outraging all those plants’ instinctive wants and searchings, would meet as his reward—sickly plants, ugly plants, sterile plants, dead plants. He will not do it; he will watch very carefully to see whether they like much sunlight, or considerable shade, whether they thrive on much water or get drowned in it . . . the plant itself indicate to him when he is doing the right thing . . . If he finds the plant revolts against his experiments, he will desist at once, and try something else; if he finds it thrives, he will emphasize the particular treatment so long as it seems beneficial. But what he will surely not do, will be to prepare a certain area of ground all just alike, with equal chances of sun and amount of moisture in every part, and then plant everything together without discrimination—mighty close together!—saying

beforehand, “If plants don’t want to thrive on this, they ought to want to; and if they are stubborn about it, they must be made to.” (ibid., p. 255) Anarchist educators would agree, then, with critical pedagogues in the judgment that the implementation of standardized testing

regimes, a cornerstone of current policies like No Child Left Behind, renders pedagogical experimentation and potential challenges to

this arrangement very difficult, even when a cantankerous or brave educator (anarchist or otherwise) does have the desire. Standardized tests are seen, in Fordist fashion, as imposing uniform performance expectations and methods upon students who have different learning styles, individual needs, and who may be at different places in their personal intellectual development. Further, rather than encouraging a curriculum oriented toward the development of critical analytical

skills, or fulfilling personal curiosity, standardized tests encourage a shallow, bulimic approach to learning. This entails the rote consumption and regurgitation of contextually isolated facts and figures on command, with high performance on a test seen as an end in itself, and synonymous with having learned something. On top of it all, standardized tests serve as gatekeepers of educational advancement, threatening failure and halting further learning until “adequacy” is demonstrated (Kohn, 2000). In the face of this sort of “education,” some radical pedagogues have looked for inspirational educational alternatives in the ancient Athenian educational system and principles of paideia (Morrison, 1995; Fotopoulos, 2005; Shiva, 2005). The value of this system does have limits, given, among

other things, the political limitations and prejudices of ancient Athens (Kahn, 2010, p. 38). However, in comparing broadly libertarian educational principles to the broad, civic-minded self-improvement goals of the ancient Athenian educational system of paideia we can find a useful epochal counterpart to relate to the modern

state. The correlate “ideal” educational system of the modern state can, then, be understood as a combination of disciplinary market instrumentalism and agoge, the ancient Spartan disciplinary regimen. In the agoge regimen, youth (solely males then) were trained to value loyalty to the State over the self, military discipline, conformity, and competition among peers for the purposes of establishing dominance (Hodkinson, 1996). In creating more space within the modern educational system for alternatives to this disciplinarian and regimented pedagogy,

alternatives like paideia or other models of inspiration, could certainly provide a welcome reprieve, and protect pockets of “spheres of free action,” even if they are ephemeral (Ward, 1973, p. 18). In comparing the structures and functional values of state schools in the United States with previous examples of anarchist schooling, and after elaborating on the values, organizational

principles and understanding of human nature within anarchist thought, I hope that the differences in values instilled and desirable types

of persons developed are made starkly apparent. Many of the critiques of state school systems offered by anarchist educators are over a century old, yet (unfortunately) sound incredibly contemporary.

A2: “Political Liberation”Any perm recreates a problematic reliance on institutions – the alternative is a completely separate structure inaccessible to the AFFTodd ’12 [Joseph Todd, adjunct instructor at MSU and Bergen Community College teaching both philosophy and education courses, “From Deschooling to Unschooling: Rethinking Anarchopedagogy after Ivan Illich,” Chapter 4: Anarchist Pedagogies: Collective Actions, Theories, and Critical Reflections on Education, Edited by Robert H. Haworth, 2012, PM Press, ISBN: 978–1–60486–484–7, p. 73-74, schauer]

Anarchic Educational Counterpublics

A political program which does not explicitly recognize the need for deschooling is not revolutionary.

(Illich, 1970, p. 75) Any anarchist struggle must be critically analyzed for its inclusion and reconstruction of education, particularly alternative deinstitutionalized learning, within the community as it exists and as it strives to become.

Anarchist theory and practice must account for deschooling in more direct and explicit ways in order to rekindle its own revolutionary potential which has waned but is seeing a strong resurgence and rearticulation that focuses on liberty, active

student-directed learning, and political participation (Godwin, 1966, p. 424). Revolutionary struggles must actively and consciously avoid repro-ducing the inculcating tendencies of the hidden curriculum, less they compromise their project for social change in the name of freedom and justice. In addition to analyzing anarchist struggles and their articulation of deschooling as it relates to political and social subjectivity, we can also examine spaces where deschooling may be happening but not articulated as part of a larger anarchist tradition

of struggles. In tracing this demarcated line of schooling on one side and deschooling on the other, we find descriptions that help to make the path more discernible. Multiple homeschooling, deschooling, and unschooling advocates put forward the negative goals of compulsory education such as coercion into capitalistic hierarchies and unquestioning obedience, as opposed to equality and community that are the targeted ideals of anarchists and deschoolers (Hern, 1996; DeLeon, 2006; DeLeon, 2008; Wheatley, 2009). These aspects of schools that are

anything but empowering take shape through the hidden curriculum and operate through mechanisms designed for conformity and

normalization. These techniques rely on shame, guilt, ridicule, and peer pressure to reinforce and maintain the hidden curriculum.

Institutionalizing dependency on the State produces individuals that are virtual wards of the State ,

incapable of inspiring any community action toward social justice on a local level, and beneficiaries of the structure in which they were

produced and left forever with the impression that things could not carry on or get done without the institution. If “schools teach children to rely on teachers, instruction, and methodologies for their learning rather than their own experience, self-reliance, and

individual abilities,” then this is where the project of anarchopedagogues and deschoolers begins (Peretti & Jones, 2001, p. 377). Deschooling itself requires a different structure and different relationship to learning , but getting there requires a different kind of social movement, bent on creating the alternative form of activism in the present, instead of attempt to influence policy and wait for the effects to trickle down. Anarchists argue for a different structure not reliant on the institutions of the State, otherwise the hidden curriculum remains unchanged and intact and will reproduce a similar State in the generation to follow the revolution (Illich, 1970; Suissa, 2001; DeLeon, 2006). This feature of Illich’s thought makes it possible to position him in anarchic theory as it relates to education, the State, and institutions and an individual’s relationship to each. Deschoolers confront, attack, and sabotage the hidden curriculum.

No net benefit to the permutation – political liberty is a bankrupt conceptShantz ’12 [Jeffery Shantz, community organizer and teacher at Kwantlen Polytechnic University in Vancouver. whose writings have appeared in academic journals including Critical Sociology, Critique of Anthropology, Feminist Review, and New Politics, “Spaces of Learning: The Anarchist Free Skool,”

Chapter 7: Anarchist Pedagogies: Collective Actions, Theories, and Critical Reflections on Education, Edited by Robert H. Haworth, 2012, PM Press, ISBN: 978–1–60486–484–7, p. 126-127, schauer]

Anarchy and Education

For anarchists, learning should help people to free themselves and encourage them to change the world in which they live. As Joel Spring (1998, p. 145) suggests:

“[E]ducation can mean gaining knowledge and ability by which one can transform the world and maximize individual autonomy.” Anarchist pedagogy aims toward developing and encouraging new forms of socialization, social interaction, and the sharing of ideas in ways that might initiate and sustain nonauthoritarian practices and ways of relating. At the same time it is hoped that such pedagogical practices might contribute to revolutionary changes in people’s perspectives on society, encouraging

broader social changes. Anarchists seek freedom from internalized authority and ideological domination. “In the modern state, laws were internalized within the individual, so that ‘freedom’ merely meant the freedom to obey the laws that one had been taught to believe” (Spring, 1998, p. 40).

Internalization of the laws through socialization in school has been viewed as a means to end disobedience and rebellion. Freedom is freedom from direct control of the state but only if one acts according to the laws of the state (Spring, 1998). The protoanarchist Max Stirner referred to the thought that one could not get rid of, the thought that owned the individual, as “wheels in the head.” Such thought controlled the will and used the individual, rather than being used by the individual (Stirner). What Stirner called “the ownership of the self ” meant the elimination of wheels in the head.

Stirner distinguished between the educated and the free. For the educated person, knowledge shaped character. It was a wheel in the head that allowed the individual to be possessed by the authority of the church or the state. For the free one, on the other hand, knowledge facilitated choice, awakened freedom. With the idea of freedom awakened within them: “the freemen will incessantly go on to free themselves; if on the contrary, one only educates them, then they will at all times accommodate themselves to circumstances in the most highly educated and elegant manner

and degenerate into subservient, cringing souls” (Stirner, 1967, p. 23). For the free, knowledge is a source of greater choice rather than a determiner of choice (Spring, 1998, p. 39). Ideas, as wheels in the head, subject people to the ideas themselves. Domination does not refer only to the internalization of ideologies that refer to sacrifice for supposed needs of society, external to the individual. It also refers to moral imperatives that capture a person’s creative capacities. There were two levels of wheels in the head. The first levelled people through everyday life. One went to church and paid taxes because that was what one was taught; that was the way one lived. On the second level were ideals—ideals that move people to sacrifice themselves for the good of the fatherland, that made them try to be Christ-like, ideals that led them to give up what they were for some unrealizable goal. It was this realm of ideals upon which the strength of the Church and State was built. Patriotism and religious fervor were the results of people being possessed by ideals. (Spring, 1998, pp.

40–41) Stirner objected to notions of “political liberty” because it only spoke of the freedom of institutions and of ideology. Political liberty “means that the polis, the State, is free ; freedom of religion that religion is free, as freedom

of conscience signifies that conscience is free; not therefore that I am free from the State, from religion, from conscience, or that I am rid of them” (Stirner, 1963, pp. 106–7). This perspective proved profoundly influential for a range of Free Skool participants, as it has for anarchist educators for decades.

FRAMEWORK

2NC – AdvocacyWe need to use debate as a site of resistance – teaches us the necessary skills to change current coordinates of social relations through direct advocacy Shantz ’12 [Jeffery Shantz, community organizer and teacher at Kwantlen Polytechnic University in Vancouver. whose writings have appeared in academic journals including Critical Sociology, Critique of Anthropology, Feminist Review, and New Politics,“Learning to Win: Anarchist Infrastructures of Resistance,” Chapter 9: Anarchist Pedagogies: Collective Actions, Theories, and Critical Reflections on Education, Edited by Robert H. Haworth, 2012, PM Press, ISBN: 978–1–60486–484–7, p. 172-173, schauer]

Infrastructures of resistance encourage people to create alternative social spaces within which liberatory institutions, practices, and relationships can be nurtured. They include the beginnings of economic and political self-management through the creation of institutions which can encourage a broader social transformation while also providing some of the conditions for personal and collective sustenance and growth in the present. This is about changing the world, not by taking control of the state, but by creating opportunities for people to

develop their personal and collective power. Infrastructures of resistance create situations in which specific communities build economic and social systems that operate, as much as possible, as working alternatives to the dominant state capitalist structures. They are organized around alternative institutions that offer at least a starting point for meeting community needs such as education, food, housing, communications, energy, transportation, child care, and so on. These institutions are autonomous from, and indeed opposed to, dominant relations and institutions of the state and capital. They may also contest “official” organs of the working class

such as bureaucratic unions or political parties. In the short term these institutions contest official structures, with an eye toward, in the longer term, replacing them. The creation of alternative institutions and relationships, which express our more far-reaching visions , can be desirable in and of itself . It is important to liberate or create space within which we might live more free and

secure lives today, as we work to build a new society. Superseding the status quo requires, in part, a refusal to participate in dominant social relations. Communities might seek to reorganize social institutions in such a way as to reclaim social and economic power and exercise it in their own collective interests. They might seek an alternative social infrastructure that is responsive to people’s needs because it is developed and controlled directly by them. Such an approach takes a firm stand against the authority vested in politicians and their corporate masters. It might also speak against

the hierarchical arrangements that exemplify major institutions such as workplaces, schools, churches, and even the family. It is important to develop the skills and resources, some forgotten or overlooked, that might contribute to this.

A2: “Policy Good”This is equivalent to “no chewing gum in class” – it’s an arbitrary set of policy standards used to enforce authoritarianism through coerced obedience Kaltefleiter & Nocella ’12 [Caroline K. Kaltefleiter, coordinator of women’s studies and associate professor of communication studies at the State University of New York College at Cortland and recent director of the Sacco and Vanzetti Foundation, and Anthony J. Nocella II, who has published more than twenty-five scholarly articles, cofounded more than twenty-five political organizations including the Sacco and Vanzetti Foundation, and serves on five boards including the American Friends Service Committee, “Anarchy in the Academy: Staying True to Anarchism as an Academic-Activist,” Chapter 11: Anarchist Pedagogies: Collective Actions, Theories, and Critical Reflections on Education, Edited by Robert H. Haworth, 2012, PM Press, ISBN: 978–1–60486–484–7, p. 201-203, schauer]

Universities: Ideological State Apparatuses

Critical theorist Louis Althusser (1971) argues that schools, universities first and foremost, function within a capitalist system to perpetuate its norms and values in order to smoothly reproduce itself. Althusser’s work addresses a cerebral society that employs forms of physical and mental

incarceration. He suggests two major mechanisms to ensure that people within a state behave according to the rules of the state, even if it may not be in their best interest (in regards to their class positions) to do so. The first is what Althusser calls

the RSA or Repressive State Apparatuses that can enforce behavior directly, such as the police, criminal justice, and prison systems (Klages,

2001). Through these “apparatuses” the state has the power to force one to physically behave and restrict one’s movements and actions. The second mechanism Althusser

examines which is central to our discussion of anarchy in the academy is what he calls ISA or Ideological State Apparatuses. According to Althusser (1971), “Ideological practice consists of an assortment of institutions called Ideological State Apparatuses (ISAs), which include the family, the media, religious organizations, and, most importantly in capitalist societies, the education system, as well as the received ideas that they propagate. Mary Klages (2001) notes, “These are

institutions that generate ideologies which we as individuals (and groups) then internalize, and in which to act in accordance. ISAs include schools, religions, the family, legal systems, politics, arts, etc. These organizations generate systems of ideas and values” (p. 239). A

value system in which the notion of both economic and cultural capital is emphasized serves to reify class indoctrination. Pierre Bourdieu (1970; 1990) notes that class domination is not only a result of economic warfare, but also a fight for cultural capital . Dominating classes use cultural capital, specifically that of knowledge, to their benefit. In the case of higher education, Bourdieu views the university system as integral to the (re)production of capitalist values, ideologies,

and imperatives, such that the educational structure is designed not to cultivate knowledge and autonomy but rather to instruct students and professors how to labor in a market-dominated world . For instance, schools of journalism often focus on the mechanics of writing and producing news without asking student journalists to critically reflect on the social, cultural, political, or economic impact of stories produced and reified in various media texts. Student writers are taught to be workers (re)producing the stories of dominant elites (Kaltefleiter, 2009). In his seminal text Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Paulo Freire (2000) discusses what he refers to as the “banking concept of education whereby students are seen as submissive learners and merely take in information that is deposited into their brain

banks by their teachers. Freire asserts that modern education is widely recognized as a chance for instructors (or “oppressors,” as he calls them) to fill students with information as they

submissively accept it. He explains that the ritual of schooling filters into an overall culture of manipulation whereby young minds are shaped to adhere to the agendas of the power elite . According to Freire (2000), Manipulation becomes a fundamental instrument for the preservation of domination. Prior to the emergence of people there is no manipulation (precisely speaking), but rather total suppression. When the oppressed are almost completely submerged in reality, it is unnecessary to manipulate them. In the antidialogical theory of action, manipulation is the response of the oppressor to the new concrete conditions of the historical process. Through manipulation, dominant elites can lead people into an unauthentic type of “organization” and can thus avoid the threatening alternative: the true organization of the emerged and emerging people. (p. 148) He continues, “[t]he dominant elites are so well aware of [the subversive nature of free inquiry] that they instinctively use all

means, including physi-cal violence to keep the people from thinking” (p. 149). Hence, independent thought is given up in favor of obedience, with the goal of keeping people “from asking questions that matter about important issues that directly affect them and others” (Chomsky and Macedo, 2000, p. 24). A discussion on ideology is crucial for us to better understand the systems of both repression and oppression that exist for university students and faculty today. Such an analysis extends Marxist theory which defines ideology as an instrument of social reproduction and is conceptually important to the sociology of knowledge—including the pursuit of knowledge taking place within the confines of university classrooms. A critical investigation of ideological frameworks related to the structure of the university and avenues of intellectual inquiry opens up the possibility for (re)thinking or (re)purposing university educations, offering competing readings of how intellectual work is carried on/out of the university and allows for creative and intellectual activity taking place in the streets, union halls, and community centers. This idea is linked to the work of Stuart Hall, who discusses the notion of encoding/decoding texts. Hall (1980) emphasizes that texts through every moment in the process of communication, allow for active message composition (encoding) and message reception (decoding). The message continuum, “from the original composition of the message/code (encoding) to the point at which it is read and understood (decoding), has its own determinants and conditions of existence” (1980, p. 129). Just as the construction of the message/code is an active, interpretive, and social event, so is the moment of reception. Hall identifies three primary positions of decoding messages and signs, including the dominant position or “preferred” reading, the “negotiated” position, and the “oppositional” position/reading that can be applied to contemporary texts, institutions, and social movements. (Kaltefleiter, 1995,

2009). Therefore the space in which university learning takes place can be resisted so as to create oppositional paradigms of thought that allow for new modes of communication and direct action . Students and faculty collaborate to

engage in a resistance culture: wherein individuals question the ways in which members of society come to internalize and to believe the ideologies set forth by ISAs , including universities. It is within this continuum of resistance that an anarchist studies pedagogy emerges. Students, faculty, and community members share in the development of course offerings—including readings, discussions, and evaluation, if such a system is necessary to be employed. Such actions serve to dismantle hierarchal structure of the academy and strive to create common spaces of engagement wherein one’s affinity to issues of peace and social justice issues can be explored in/out of formal structures of learning.

AFFIRMATIVE RESPONSES

PERMUTATION

2AC – Perm Do BothPermutation – do both. The permutation solves by allowing for critical interrogation of schooling’s flaws without abandoning the entire system Varbelow and Griffith ‘12 – Sanja Varbelow, Assistant Professor in the Department of Teacher Education at Angelo State University, Former Field-Based Teaching Specialist in Learning and Innovation and Lecturer in Curriculum and Instruction at The University of Texas at Brownsville, Member of the American Educational Research Association and the Society for Professors of Education, Ph.D. in Curriculum and Instruction from Texas A&M University, 2012,“Deschooling Society: Re-Examining Ivan Illich’s Contributions to Critical Pedagogy for 21st Century Curriculum Theory,” Education Resources Information Center, June 6th, http://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED532618.pdf]

Illich (1971) insists that the only way to learn anything at all is through “incidental or informal education ”

(p. 22). This is a very interesting idea because most of what we learn in schools does not pertain to subject matter but to socialization and values as dictated through the hidden curriculum by the dominant class (Apple, 1990). The things we have learned, we did learn through experience and needs; therefore, I want to argue that schools should provide such opportunities as suggested by Rousseau and Dewey (Cremin, 1959). But Illich disagrees. He (Illich, 1971) calls Dewey’s progressivism, which provides real-world experiences, “the pacification of the new generation within specifically engineered enclaves which will seduce them into the dream world of their elders” (p. 66). He extends the metaphor to the idea of Free Schools as they, too, make all valuable learning dependent on institutionalized teaching. This is the commonality between Illich and the critical pedagogues based on which they count him among their proponents. Very interesting is his comparison of learning in the village where everybody provided his services as needed and was therefore meaningful to his

community. Illich (1971) says “modern man must find meaning in many structures to which he is only marginally related” (p. 22). This is truer

even more today, 40 years later. Should it then not be the responsibility of school to enable students to find that meaning for themselves, I wonder? But Illich (1971) doubts that the education system is anything other than a mechanism to “break the integrity of an entire population and make it plastic material for the teachings” (p. 50). It seems the underlying philosophy that connects both, Illich and scholars like McLaren, Kincheloe and Apple, is that all see how men “shield themselves … behind certificates acquired in school” and want to use the institution to revolt against itself by pointing out its deficiencies hoping that its members “gain in courage to talk back and thereby control and instruct the institutions they participate in” (Illich, 1971, p. 23). While this is precisely the purpose of Critical Pedagogy, for Illich, it feels like a discrepancy in his logic. I share his apprehension of institutions in general, which, by their very nature, are structured hierarchies that leave no room for the complexities of individual freedom and are, by definition, self-justifying and manipulative. He (Illich, 1971) points out the difference between the “Biblical message and institutionalized religion” and says that “Christian freedom and faith

usually gain from secularization” (p. 24) thereby making a point for deschooling society. But then he (Illich, 1971) says that “the deschooling of education depends on the leadership of those brought up in schools” because “each of us remains responsible for

what has been made of him” (p. 24). When reading Deschooling Society, I am left with the impression that Illich actually wants to deinstitutionalize society. He brings many examples of society’s regression caused by other institutions such as the one of medical care, the Army, or the system of highways and cars, all of which turn us into active members of a society focused on growth and consumption . We can add to that today’s media such as the NFL or TV with shows that “educate” us about aesthetics, epistemology and metaphysics by telling us what is considered beautiful, important, desirable, etc. I am referring to programs such as Oprah (including her book club), Hanna Montana or American Idol. And yet, the above quote seems to make an

argument against this impression. However, I do not feel he had in mind what Freire said when he insisted “that it is a political imperative for critical educators to develop a strong command of their particular academic discipline” because “by doing so, they can competently teach the ‘official transcript’ of their field while simultaneously creating

opportunities for students to engage critically in classroom content” (Darder et al., 2003, p. 20). When Illich calls upon the “educators brought up in school” as the leaders to deschool society, it appears that he actually refers to those who, not because of but despite of school, understand its deficiencies . If this were so, he would make an argument for the deinstitutionalization of society and against Critical Pedagogy thereby following his original logic. One of the most important points Illich (1971) makes is that it is the “transfer of responsibility from self to institution” that guarantees social regression (p. 39). Here he seems to agree with Hegel who says that the ultimate goal of education is the freedom of the individual which includes his in/dependence on institutions. By freedom I believe Hegel means the ability to

make the conscious decision to be part of or to distance oneself from an institution. However, in order to make that decision, one has to have

undergone the contradictions and conflicts during which one discovers oneself. It is these contradictions and conflicts that are one’s impetus and which will be integrated to reach a higher level. Based on that, Hegel would think the purpose of school is to discover oneself (Hegel, 1841). The goal then should not be to deinstitutionalize society thereby removing all conflicts arising through the demagoguery of schools, but to enable learners to see the institution for what it is. If they understand it as a manipulative mechanism whose goal it is to create compliant citizen who do not raise questions regarding ethics, epistemology, or metaphysics but instead further the influence of the dominant class by advancing its economic strength, learners should be empowered to devise strategies to change that. However, this cannot be done by deschooling society but only through applied Critical Pedagogy which affords learners to understand what it means to be a critical agent.

The net benefit is political liberty - reform can create a revolutionary citizenry without devolving into chaosGintis ‘72 – [Herbert Gintis, Visiting professor in the Economics Department of Central European University, Ph.D. in Economics from Harvard University, 1972,“Towards a Political Economy of Education: A Radical Critique of Ivan Illich 's Deschooling Society,” Harvard Educational Review, February, http://hepgjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.17763/haer.42.1.h2m4644728146775]

I have already argued that de-schooling will inevitably lead to a situation of social chaos , but probably not to a serious mass movement toward constructive social change. In this case the correspondence principle simply fails to hold, producing at best a temporary (in case the ruling elites can find an alternative mode of worker socialization) or ultimately fatal (in case they cannot) breakdown in the social fabric. But

only if we posit some essential pre-social human nature on which individuals draw when normal paths of individual development

are abolished, might this lead in itself to liberating alternatives. But the argument over the sufficiency of de-schooling is nearly

irrelevant. For schools are so important to the reproduction of capitalist society that they are unlikely to crumble under any but the most massive political onslaughts . "Each of us," says Illich, "is personally responsible for his or her own de-schooling, and only we have the power to do it." This is not true. Schooling is legally obligatory, and is the major means of access to welfare-relevant activity contexts. The political consciousness behind a frontal attack on institutionalized education would necessarily spill over to attacks on other major institutions. "Th e risks of a revolt against school," says Illich, . . . are unforeseeable, but they are not as horrible as those of a revolution starting in any other major institution. School is not yet organized for self-protection as effectively as a nation-state, or even a large corporation.

Liberation from the grip of schools could be bloodless. (DS, p. 49) This is no more than whistling in the dark. T h e only presently viable political strategy in education —and the precise negation of Illich's recommendations—is what Rudi Deutchke terms "the long march through the institutions," involving localized struggles for what Andre Gorz calls "non-reformist reforms ," i.e., reforms which effectively strengthen the power of teachers vis-a-vis administrators, and of students vis-a-vis teachers. Still, although schools neither can nor should be eliminated , the social relations of education can be altered through genuine struggle . Moreover, the experience of both struggle and control prepares the student for a future of political activity in factory

and office. 93 In other words, the correct immediate political goal is the nurturing of individuals both liberated (i.e.,

demanding control over their lives and outlets for their creative activities and relationships) and politically aware of the true nature of their misalignment with the larger society . There may indeed be a bloodless solution to the problem of revolution, but certainly none more simple than this.

FRAMEWORK

2AC – Policy GoodPrefer a policy approach grounded in concrete change – their rejection of state frameworks devolve into endless critique without any concrete action Bryant ‘12 [Levi Bryant is currently a Professor of Philosophy at Collin College. In addition to working as a professor, Bryant has also served as a Lacanian psychoanalyst. He received his Ph.D. from Loyola University in Chicago, Illinois, where he originally studied 'disclosedness' with the Heidegger scholar Thomas Sheehan. Bryant later changed his dissertation topic to the transcendental empiricism of Gilles Deleuze, “Critique of the Academic Left”, http://larvalsubjects.wordpress.com/2012/11/11/underpants-gnomes-a-critique-of-the-academic-left/]

Unfortunately, the academic left falls prey to its own form of abstraction. It’s good at carrying out critiques that denounce various social formations, yet very poor at proposing any sort of realistic constructions of alternatives. This

because it thinks abstractly in its own way, ignoring how networks, assemblages, structures, or regimes of attraction would have to be remade to create a workable alternative. Here I’m reminded by the “underpants gnomes” depicted in South Park :¶ The underpants gnomes have a plan for achieving profit that goes like this: ¶ Phase 1: Collect Underpants ¶ Phase 2: ? ¶ Phase 3: Profit! ¶ They even have a catchy song to go with their work:¶ Well this

is sadly how it often is with the academic left. Our plan seems to be as follows:¶ Phase 1: Ultra-Radical Critique¶ Phase 2: ?¶ Phase 3: Revolution

and complete social transformation!¶ Our problem is that we seem perpetually stuck at phase 1 without ever explaining what is to be done at phase 2. Often the critiques articulated at phase 1 are right, but there are nonetheless all sorts of problems with those critiques nonetheless. In order to reach phase 3, we have to produce new collectives . In order for new collectives to be produced, people need to be able to hear and understand the critiques developed at phase 1. Yet this is where everything

begins to fall apart. Even though these critiques are often right, we express them in ways that only an academic with a PhD in critical theory and post-structural theory can understand. How exactly is Adorno to produce an effect in the world if only PhD’s in the humanities can understand him? Who are these things for? We seem to always ignore these things and then look down our noses with disdain at the Naomi Kleins and David Graebers of the world. To make matters worse, we publish our work in expensive academic journals that only universities can afford, with presses that don’t have a wide distribution, and give our talks at expensive hotels at academic conferences attended only by other academics. Again, who are these things for? Is it an accident that so many activists look away from these things with contempt, thinking their more about an academic industry and tenure, than producing change in the world? If a tree falls in a forest and no one is there to hear it, it doesn’t make a sound! Seriously dudes and dudettes, what are you doing?¶ But finally, and worst of all, us Marxists and anarchists all too often act like assholes.

We denounce others, we condemn them, we berate them for not engaging with the questions we want to engage with, and we vilify them when they don’t embrace every bit of the doxa that we endorse. We are every bit as off-putting and unpleasant as the fundamentalist minister or the priest of the inquisition (have people yet understood that Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus was a critique of the French communist party system and the Stalinist

party system, and the horrific passions that arise out of parties and identifications in general?). This type of “revolutionary” is the greatest friend of the reactionary and capitalist because they do more to drive people into the embrace of reigning ideology than to undermine reigning ideology. These are the people that keep Rush Limbaugh in business. Well done !¶ But

this isn’t where our most serious shortcomings lie. Our most serious shortcomings are to be found at phase 2. We almost never make concrete proposals for how things ought to be restructured, for what new material infrastructures and semiotic fields need to be produced , and when we do , our critique-intoxicated cynics and skeptics immediately jump in with an analysis of all the ways in which these things contain dirty secrets, ugly motives, and are doomed to fail. How, I wonder, are we to do anything at all when we have no concrete proposals? We live on a planet of 6 billion people. These 6 billion people are dependent on a certain network of

production and distribution to meet the needs of their consumption. That network of production and distribution does involve the extraction of resources, the production of food, the maintenance of paths of transit and communication, the disposal of waste, the building of shelters, the distribution of medicines, etc., etc., etc.¶ What are your proposals? How will you meet these problems? How will you navigate the existing mediations or semiotic and material features of infrastructure? Marx and Lenin had proposals. Do you? Have you even explored the cartography of the problem? Today we are so intellectually bankrupt on these points that we even have theorists speaking of events and acts and talking about a return to the old socialist party systems, ignoring the horror they generated, their failures, and not even proposing ways of avoiding the repetition of these horrors in a new system of organization. Who among our critical theorists is thinking seriously about how to build a distribution and production system that is responsive to the needs of global consumption, avoiding the problems of planned economy, ie.,

who is doing this in a way that gets notice in our circles? Who is addressing the problems of micro-fascism that arise with party systems (there’s a reason that it was the Negri & Hardt contingent, not the Badiou contingent that has

been the heart of the occupy movement). At least the ecologists are thinking about these things in these terms because, well, they think ecologically. Sadly we need something more, a melding of the ecologists, the Marxists, and

the anarchists. We’re not getting it yet though, as far as I can tell. Indeed, folks seem attracted to yet another critical paradigm, Laruelle.¶ I would love, just for a moment, to hear a

radical environmentalist talk about his ideal high school that would be academically sound. How would he provide for the energy needs of that school? How would he meet building codes in an

environmentally sound way? How would she provide food for the students? What would be her plan for waste disposal? And most importantly, how would she navigate the school board, the state legislature, the federal government , and all the families of

these students? What is your plan? What is your alternative? I think there are alternatives. I saw one that approached an alternative in Rotterdam. If you want to make a truly

revolutionary contribution, this is where you should start . Why should anyone even bother listening to you if you aren’t proposing real plans? But we haven’t even gotten to that point. Instead we’re like underpants gnomes, saying “revolution is the answer!” without addressing

any of the infrastructural questions of just how revolution is to be produced, what alternatives it would offer, and how we would concretely go about building those alternatives. Masturbation.¶ “Underpants gnome” deserves to be a category in critical theory; a sort of synonym for self-congratulatory

masturbation. We need less critique not because critique isn’t important or necessary– it is –but because we know the critiques , we know the problems . We’re intoxicated with critique because it’s easy and safe. We

best every opponent with critique . We occupy a position of moral superiority with critique. But do we really do anything with critique? What we need today, more than ever, is composition or carpentry. Everyone knows something is wrong. Everyone knows this system is

destructive and stacked against them. Even the Tea Party knows something is wrong with the economic system, despite having the wrong economic theory. None of us, however, are proposing alternatives. Instead we prefer to shout and denounce. Good luck with that.

IMPACTS

2AC – FramingConsequences first – focus on morality is complicity with injustice Issac ‘2 [Jeffrey C. Isaac, James H. Rudy Professor of Political Science and Director of the Center for the Study of Democracy and Public Life at Indiana University, Spring 2002, Dissent, Vol. 49, No. 2]

As writers such as Niccolo Machiavelli, Max Weber, Reinhold Niebuhr, and Hannah Arendt have taught, an unyielding concern with moral goodness undercuts political responsibility. The concern may be morally laudable, reflecting a kind of personal integrity,

but it suffers from three fatal flaws: (1) It fails to see that the purity of one's intention does not ensure the

achievement of what one intends. Abjuring violence or refusing to make common cause with morally compromised parties may

seem like the right thing; but if such tactics entail impotence, then it is hard to view them as serving any moral good beyond the clean conscience of their supporters; (2) it fails to see that in a world of real violence and

injustice, moral purity is not simply a form of powerlessness; it is often a form of complicity in injustice. This is why, from the standpoint of politics--as opposed to religion--pacifism is always a potentially immoral stand. In categorically repudiating violence, it refuses in principle to oppose certain violent injustices with any effect; and (3) it fails to see that politics is as much about unintended consequences as it

is about intentions; it is the effects of action, rather than the motives of action, that is most significant. Just as the alignment with "good" may engender impotence, it is often the pursuit of "good" that generates evil. This is the lesson of communism in the twentieth century: it is not enough that one's goals be sincere or idealistic; it is equally important, always, to ask about the effects of

pursuing these goals and to judge these effects in pragmatic and historically contextualized ways. Moral absolutism inhibits this

judgment. It alienates those who are not true believers. It promotes arrogance . And it undermines political effectiveness.

Their impacts are inevitable – any “institutionalized values” they criticize are produced by natural social processes Gintis ‘72 – [Herbert Gintis, Visiting professor in the Economics Department of Central European University, Ph.D. in Economics from Harvard University, 1972,“Towards a Political Economy of Education: A Radical Critique of Ivan Illich 's Deschooling Society,” Harvard Educational Review, February, http://hepgjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.17763/haer.42.1.h2m4644728146775]

Mich's model of consumption-manipulation is crucial at every stage of his political argument. But it is substantially incorrect. In the following three sections I shall criticize three basic thrusts of

his analysis. 75 First, Illich locates the source of social decay in the autonomous, manipulative behavior of corporate bureaucracies. I shall argue, in contrast, that the source must be sought in the normal operation of the basic economic institutions of capitalism (markets in factors of production, private control of resources and technology, etc.),3 which consistently sacrifice the healthy development of community, work, environment, education, and social equality to the accumulation of capital and the growth of

marketable goods and services. Moreover, given that individuals must participate in economic activity, these social outcomes are quite insensitive to the preferences or values of individuals , and are certainly in no sense a reflection of the autonomous wills of manipulating

bureaucrats or gullible consumers. Hence merely ending "manipulation" while maintaining basic economic institutions will affect the rate of social decay only minimally. Second, Illich locates the source of consumer consciousness in the manipulative socialization of individuals by agencies controlled by corporate and welfare

bureaucracies. This "institutionalized consciousness" induces indivduals to choose outcomes not in conformity with their "real" needs. I shall argue, in contrast, that a causal analysis can never take socialization agencies as basic explanatory variables in assessing the overall behavior of the social system.4 In particular, consumer consciousness is generated through the day- to-day activities and observations of individuals in capitalist society. The sales pitches of manipulative institutions , rather than generating the values of commodity fetishism, merely capitalize upon and reinforce a set of values derived from and reconfirmed by daily personal experience in the social system . In fact, while consumer behavior may seem irrational and fetishistic, it is a reasonable accommodation to the options for meaningful social outlets in the context of capitalist institutions. Hence the abolition of addictive propaganda cannot "liberate"

the individual to "free choice" of personal goals. Such choice is still conditioned by the pattern of social processes which have historically rendered him or her amenable to "institutionalized values ." In fact, the likely outcome of de-manipulation of values would be no significant alteration of values at all . Throughout this paper, I restrict my analysis to capitalist as opposed to other economic systems of advanced industrial societies (e.g., state-socialism of the Soviet Union type). As Illich suggests, the outcomes are much the same, but the mechanisms are in fact quite different. The private-administrative economic power of a capitalist elite is mirrored by the public-administrative political power of a bureaucratic elite in state-socialistcountries, and both are used to reproduce a similar complex of social relations of production and a structurally equivalent system of class relations. The capitalist variety is emphasized here because of its special relevance in the American context.

ALTERNATIVE

2AC – Alternative FailsThe alternative fails and solidifies existing problems with the status quo – they can’t solve liberation with their radical rejection of existing structuresGintis ‘72 – [Herbert Gintis, Visiting professor in the Economics Department of Central European University, Ph.D. in Economics from Harvard University, 1972,“Towards a Political Economy of Education: A Radical Critique of Ivan Illich 's Deschooling Society,” Harvard Educational Review, February, http://hepgjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.17763/haer.42.1.h2m4644728146775]

Illich recognizes that the problems of advanced industrial societies are institutional , and that their solutions lie deep

in the social core. Therefore, he consciously rejects a partial or affirmative analysis which would accept society's dominant ideological forms and direct its innovative contributions toward marginal changes in assumptions and boundary conditions. Instead, he employs a methodology of total critique and negation, and his successes, such as they are, stem from that choice. Ultimately, however, his analysis is incomplete. Dialectical analysis begins with society as is (thesis), entertains its negation (antithesis), and overcomes both in a radical reconceptualization (synthesis). Negation is a form of demystification—a drawing away from the immediately given by viewing it as a "negative

totality." But negation is not without presuppositions, is not itself a form of liberation . It cannot "wipe clean the slate" of ideological representation of the world or one's objective position in it. The son/daughter who acts on the negation of parental and societal values is not free—he/she is merely the constrained negative image of that which he/she rejects (e.g., the negation of work, consumption order, and rationality is not liberation but negative un-freedom). The negation of male dominance is not women's liberation but the (negative) affirmation of "female masculinity." Women's liberation in dialectical terms can be conceived of as the overcoming (synthesis) of male dominance (thesis) and

female masculinity (antithesis) in a new totality which rejects/embodies both. It is this act of overcoming (synthesis, consciousness) which is the critical and liberating aspect of dialectical thought. Action lies not in the act of negation (antithesis,

demystification) but in the act of overcoming (synthesis/consciousness). The strengths of Illich's analysis lie in his consistent and pervasive methodology of negation. The essential elements in the liberal conceptions of the Good Life— consumption and education, the welfare state and corporate

manipulation—are demystified and laid bare in the light of critical, negative thought. Illich's failures can be consistently traced to his refusal to pass beyond negations -—beyond a total rejection of the appearances of life in advanced industrial societies—to a higher synthesis. While Illich should not be criticized for failing to achieve such a synthesis, nevertheless he must be

taken seriously to task for mystifying the nature of his own contribution and refusing to step—however tentatively—beyond it. Work is alienating—Illich rejects work; consumption is unfulfilling—Illich rejects consumption; institutions are manipulative—Illich places "nonaddictiveness" at the center of his conception of human institutions; production is bureaucratic—Illich glorifies the entrepreneurial and small-scale enterprise; schools are dehumanizing— Illich rejects schools; political life is oppressive and ideologically totalitarian— Illich rejects politics in favor of individual liberation. Only in one sphere does he go beyond negation, and this defines his major contribution. While technology is in fact dehumanizing (thesis), he does not reject technology (antithesis). Rather he goes beyond technology

and its negation towards a schema of liberating technological forms in education. The cost of his failure to pass beyond negation in the sphere of social relations in general, curiously enough, is an implicit affirmation of the deepest characteristics of the existing order .30 In rejecting work, Illich affirms that it necessarily is alienating— reinforcing a fundamental

pessimism on which the acceptance of capitalism is based; in rejecting consumption, he affirms either that it is inherently unfulfilling (the Protestant ethic), or would be fulfilling if unmanipulated; in rejecting manipulative and bureaucratic "delivery systems," he affirms the laissez-faire capitalist model and its core institutions ; in rejecting schools, Illich embraces a commodityfetishist cafeteria-smorgasbord ideal in education; and in rejecting political action, he affirms a utilitarian individualistic conception of humanity. In all cases, Illich's analysis fails to pass beyond the given (in both its positive and negative totalities), and hence affirms it.

The alternative fails – formal teaching instruction is vital to student learningMitchell ‘7 [Ethan Mitchell, Independent Researcher for Philica Institute in the United States, 2007, “Educational Antidisestablishmentarianism”, Philica, http://www.philica.com/display_article.php?article_id=74]

Teaching

The claim that students, not teachers, are the primary agents of learning has been criticized from various directions.

Teaching (or motivating students to learn new things) remains possible, even if some students learn things outside the classroom[72], and even if it could be shown that such teaching is a rarity[73]. After all, if one concedes that it is possible for teachers to

indoctrinate students or crush their spirits, then they must have the influence to affect children positively as well[74].

Perhaps teacher-directed learning is less efficient than student-directed learning, but there is no evidence that this is the case[75]. Consensual education makes extraordinary demands of the teachers , both intellectually and emotionally[76]. In

particular, consensual education demands a genuine emotional attitude on the part of teachers that cannot be a mere pragmatic strategy[77]. Love and respect cannot be faked to any useful effect. Some authors have criticized the actual teaching quality and classroom methods in free-schools, as if the teachers, satisfied at having created a liberated environment, "pretend to abdicate…the power which they do possess and continue to exercise" as expert knowledge providers[78].

Moreover, in primarily addressing educators, consensual learning shifts responsibilities away from parents and the community, which need to share them[79]. Consensual educators are also said to present a false degree of indifference between

the merits of various subjects (Bach and Elvis are equivalent). Variously, consensual educators advocate the worse subject over the better one. In either case, these presentations are insincere and possibly dangerous. Kozol wrote: "It is, too often, the rich white kids who speak three languages with native fluency, at the price of sixteen years of high-cost, rigorous and sequential education, who are the most determined that poor kids should make clay vases, weave Indian headbands, play with Polaroid

cameras, climb over geodesic domes[80]." Testing and Success Testing and certification were defended as necessary in schools so that we can measure progress (of students and schools). They also occur outside of schools, e.g. in sports, and so they cannot be thought of as a school-specific problem[81]. Professional success, in a conventional understanding of the concept, matters[82]. Such

standards have empirically been shown to be trans-cultural[83]. No one thinks that a street-cleaner is "just as good as" a doctor. Moreover,

professional success is especially vital for poor and oppressed populations[84]. Radicals' tendency to disregard or

minimize the importance of career success as an outcome measure is short-sighted[85].

2AC – Hierarchies TurnDeschooling recreates structural inequalities and favors already privileged studentsMitchell ‘7 [Ethan Mitchell, Independent Researcher for Philica Institute in the United States, 2007, “Educational Antidisestablishmentarianism”, Philica, http://www.philica.com/display_article.php?article_id=74]

Re-Entrenching Inequality

Deschooling, several authors contested, would be bad for the poor , who were alleged to oppose it[33]. Consensual

learning as a type of laissez-faire might undo the redistributive economics of democratic education, creating new concentrations of power and privilege or maintaining the status quo[34]. By shifting to a local scale, consensual learning tended to create a race- and class-homogenous studium generale, and allowed educators in privileged communities to

abandon the rest of society; Kozol described a typical free school in Vermont as "a sandbox for the children of the SS guards at Auschwitz.[35]." On a world scale,

deschooling "in its most anarchistic sense" would ossify the unequal levels of development between nations[36]. These concerns are exacerbated and extended if consensual education is especially costly.

Added expenses might be incurred as economies of scale are lost , or if small free-schools are expected to have "an implausibly wide range of ‘relevant equipment' or resources at their disposal.[37]" Potentially, all the successes of

free schools could be attributed to the high socio-economic status of the students[38]. However, free schools seemed to run on very narrow financial margins[39 ], and thus were also criticized for being unsustainably financially vulnerable. Moreover, decision-making around finance depended on the adult community -both in the conventional and

alternative models-and adults might have different and internally conflicting goals for the studium generale [40].